Brian Williams - Predators

American reporter David Rohde, who was captured by the Haqqani Network and held prisoner in North Waziristan, saw for himself the Taliban’s efforts to hunt down real or suspected spies. His extraordinary eyewitness account reveals some insight into their feverish witch hunts:

After 15 minutes, the guards took me back to our house and explained what had happened. Missiles from American drones had struck two cars, they said, killing seven Arab militants and local Taliban fighters. Later, I learned that one of our guards suggested I be taken to the site of the attack and ritually beheaded. The chief guard overruled him.

The strikes fueled a vicious paranoia among the Taliban. For months, our guards told us of civilians being rounded up, accused of working as American spies and hung in local markets. Immediately after that attack in South Waziristan, a feverish hunt began for a local spy who the Taliban were convinced had somehow secretly guided the Americans to the two cars.

Several days after the strike, our guards told us foreign militants had arrested a local man and accused him of guiding the drones. After the jihadists disemboweled the villager and chopped off his leg, he “confessed” to being an American spy, they said. Then the militants decapitated the man and hung his corpse in the local bazaar as a warning. 124

Clearly these cruel actions reveal that the furious Taliban and al Qaeda fighters understood that the CIA was targeting them exclusively—not random civilians.

The pathrais were not the final piece of the puzzle of the drones’ uncanny precision. The missiles the drones fired had also become smaller and less likely to kill innocents via large explosions or shrapnel. In April 2010 the Washington Post published a groundbreaking article that reported,

The CIA is using new, smaller missiles and advanced surveillance techniques to minimize civilian casualties in its targeted killings of suspected insurgents in Pakistan’s tribal areas, according to current and former officials in the United States and Pakistan. The technological improvements have resulted in more accurate operations that have provoked relatively little public outrage, the officials said….

Last month, a small CIA missile, probably no bigger than a violin case and weighing about 35 pounds, tore through the second floor of a house in Miran Shah, a town in the tribal province of South Waziristan. The projectile exploded, killing a top al-Qaeda official and about nine other suspected terrorists. The mud-brick house collapsed and the roof of a neighboring house was damaged, but no one else in the town of 5,000 was hurt, according to U.S. officials who have reviewed after-action reports….

The clamor over the strikes has died down considerably over the past year and Pakistani officials acknowledge that improved accuracy is one of the reasons. Pakistani security officials say that better targeting technology, a deeper pool of spies in the tribal areas, and greater cooperation between the U.S. and Pakistani intelligence services have all led to strikes that cause fewer civilian deaths. 125

The violin case–sized missile described in this article appears to be the thirty-five-pound Lockheed Martin Scorpion. On its website Lockheed described the Scorpion as the “war fighter’s answer to precision attack using a small, lethal warhead against targets in areas requiring low collateral damage.” The site further declared, “The precision provided by these seeker types ensures accuracy to less than one meter and dramatically reduces the possibility of collateral damage.” 126Whereas the Hellfire missile previously fired by drones was sixty-four inches long and weighed 108 pounds, the Scorpion was twenty-one inches in length and weighed thirty-five pounds. Although the drones could easily shoot a salvo of Hellfires or safely drop heavier Paveway laser-guided bombs on training camps, the more surgical approach required in “civilian-rich” environments, where innocent bystanders could be accidentally killed, meant the Scorpion. The new smaller missiles allowed the United States to proudly proclaim that although in Vietnam the collateral damage radius for an aerial bomb explosion was four hundred feet, with a drone it had been diminished to forty feet. 127

The Economist pointed to yet a sixth reason for the plummeting number of civilian deaths from drone strikes, namely, the tendency for the CIA to hit targets that were in vehicles, “where militants can be more easily hit without killing civilians.” 128In essence, the drones could see who got into the vehicles and then target them when they were driving in areas with few civilians nearby. An extensive report by the Indo-Asian News Service (IANS) found that

As many as 39 precision strikes targeting Al Qaeda and its Pakistani affiliates in North Waziristan took place over the past three months, an [American] official said, adding the strikes killed 605 people. The dead comprised 507 Pakistanis, majority of them militants, and 98 foreigners.

Security officials have been taken by surprise by the CIA’s increasing ability to take out moving targets. Predator drones Monday fired missiles at two vehicles in North Waziristan, killing 18 people.

“One of the vehicles was loaded with explosives to the hilt and had it been targeted in a compound the devastation would have been huge,” the official was quoted as saying. “So a moving target is ideal in the sense that it minimizes chances of collateral damage.”

Officials said there has been mounting evidence of the CIA tracking moving targets in Pakistan’s tribal regions from inside Afghanistan and then attacking them. “The evidence we have is circumstantial but that the CIA is able to hit mobile target demonstrates enhanced humint on the ground,” the official said on the condition of anonymity.

A source said: “The Americans seem to have made considerable ingress in our tribal regions and I doubt this could have happened without our knowledge and approval.” The security official pointed out that “real-time [human] intelligence” in North Waziristan had helped the CIA to hit moving targets.

“They have improved their intelligence collection to deliver punishment in real time,” said another official while referring to the drone attacks in the tribal areas. “Moving targets tend to vanish quickly. So you have to have human intelligence on the ground to identify and engage the target in real time in a matter of minutes. This requires credible intelligence and communication system to direct the strike and this means that CIA’s human intelligence has improved considerably,” the official said. 129

At this time there were many reports in the Pakistani press about Taliban and al Qaeda vehicles being destroyed by drones, presumably based on a combination of on-the-ground humint and drone surveillance. A typical account read,

In another attack by the US spy planes, a double-cabin pickup truck was targeted in Mezar village of Dattakhel Tehsil not far from the Urgoon area of Afghanistan’s Paktika province. Official sources said six militants, suspected to be foreigners, were killed in the attack. “The pickup truck was split into pieces and there was almost no sign of the five people travelling in the vehicle,” Taliban sources told our sources. The sources said those killed were Arab fighters returning to their hideouts located in the mountainous border areas between Pakistan and Afghanistan after a clash with the US-led coalition forces across the border in Paktika. However, details about their nationality and identity weren’t available. 130

New York Times correspondent David Rohde similarly commented on the drones’ accuracy in hitting Taliban vehicles. He wrote, “Based on the reactions of the [Taliban] guards, the attacks appear to primarily kill militants.” Among other things, Rohde described being near a drone attack on two cars that killed seven Arab militants and a local Taliban fighter, but no civilians. 131