Brian Williams - Predators

In March 2011 the New York Times reported, “In recent years they [the drone strikes] have provoked less outrage in the tribal areas, as the strikes have focused increasingly on foreign fighters loyal to Al Qaeda who have infiltrated the area, and as fewer civilians have been killed by them.” 132Christine Fair, who carried out fieldwork in the FATA, reported, “When children hear the buzz of the drones, they go to their roofs to watch the spectacle of precision rather than cowering in fear of random ‘death from above.’” 133

Pakistani military officials on the ground in the region, who had intimate knowledge of who was being killed and who was not, also remarked on the drones’ increasing accuracy. One senior Pakistani official said, “You don’t hear so much about it [the drone campaign]…. There are better targets and better intelligence on the ground. It’s less of a crapshoot.” 134According to the Wikileak documents that exposed many aspects of the Pakistani and U.S. views on drones,

A U.S. diplomat, based in Peshawar near the border territories, mentions in a 2008 cable a meeting he had with a senior [Pakistani] official whose name is redacted. The official “said he wanted to say in an unofficial capacity that he and many others could accept Predator strikes as they were surgical and clearly hitting high value targets. He mentioned that fear among the local populace in areas where the strikes have been occurring was lessening because ‘everyone knew that they only hit the house or location of very bad people.’” 135

Similarly, Malik Naveed Khan, a provincial police chief from the tribal zone, could not contain his admiration for the drones: “They are very precise, very effective, and the Taliban and al-Qaida dread them.” 136A former Pakistani ambassador further supported the claims of accuracy, stating, “There is no gainsaying the fact that drone accuracy has improved considerably. Of late only those get killed who are targeted. And, by the looks of it, there is no more effective way of reaching the upper echelons of the Taliban.” 137A former Pakistani general opined, “There is no doubt that the US military and the CIA, with better intelligence and sophisticated technology, have been more accurate in their targeting. They have also been successful in hitting at least mid-level Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders, and with less collateral damage. Apparently, improved targeting has been possible by integrating the latest technology with a reliable network of human intelligence that places transmitters at the right places for the drones to respond.” 138

Pakistani citizens also noticed the change. A Pakistani blogger on the popular Khyber Watch site wrote, “According to our latest and fresh information obtained from friends and political people that whenever drones are seen hovering in Waziristan our people are satisfied that only terrorists and their friends will be hit hard.” 139Similarly, Professor Ijaz Khattak of the University of Peshawar explained to a popular television host in Pakistan, “The drone attacks have proved effective and have targeted the terrorists and there has been little collateral damage in the US drone attacks.” 140A Pashtun researcher from the region interviewed Pashtun students from the FATA and found that these students thought that “the drone attacks cause a minimum loss of innocent civilians and their property. The respondents appreciated the precision of such attacks.” 141A resident of North Waziristan who witnessed numerous missile strikes told the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), “The attacks have become so precise. In a village, if they want to hit a house in the middle of the village and it’s surrounded by other houses, the missile would come and hit that one house only.” 142

Surprisingly, the Taliban acknowledged this precision as well. One pamphlet issued by the Taliban in North Waziristan acknowledged, “Westerners have some regard for civilians, and they do distinguish between Taliban fighters and civilians, but the Pakistani army doesn’t.” 143Articles that reported the drones’ precision in killing al Qaeda and Taliban targets and avoiding civilian deaths also occasionally appeared in the Pakistani media. A December 2010 article in the Pakistani newspaper Dawn , for example, read, “American officials do not acknowledge that war or discuss who is being killed in drone-fired missile attacks on al-Qaida and Taliban targets, which have surged this year to average about two a week. But they have said privately that the strikes are highly precise and harm very few innocents. Some locals agree about their accuracy, especially when compared to bombing runs by Pakistani jets.” 144A Pashtun from the FATA agreed with this when she wrote of her experience in at home:

I have heard people particularly appreciating the precision of drone strikes. People say that when a drone would hover over the skies, they wouldn’t be disturbed and would carry on their usual business because they would be sure that it does not target the civilians, but the same people would run for shelter when a Pakistani jet would appear in the skies because of its indiscriminate firing. They say that even in the same compound only the exact room [where an HVT is present] is targeted. Thus others in the same compound are spared. 145

But the most important testimony to the drones’ accuracy was yet to come. On March 9, 2011, Dawn published a remarkably frank interview with a member of the Pakistani military based in Waziristan who openly supported the drone strikes on the basis of their precision in killing terrorists. The interview, titled “Most of Those Killed in Drone Attacks Were Terrorists,” was electrifying for the minority of Pakistanis who supported the drone strikes and was scorned by those who detested them. The article read,

In a rather rare move, the Pakistan military for the first time gave the official version of US drone attacks in the tribal region and said that most of those killed were hardcore Al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists and a fairly large number of them were of foreign origin.

General Officer Commanding 7-Division Maj-Gen Ghayur Mehmood said in a briefing here: “Myths and rumors about predator strikes and the casualty figures are many, but it’s a reality that many of those being killed in these strikes are hardcore elements, a sizeable number of them foreigners. Yes there are a few civilian casualties in such precision strikes, but a majority of those eliminated are terrorists, including foreign terrorist elements.”

The Military’s 7-Division’s official paper on the attacks till Monday said that between 2007 and 2011 about 164 predator strikes had been carried out and over 964 terrorists had been killed. Of those killed, 793 were locals and 171 foreigners, including Arabs, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Chechens, Filipinos and Moroccans.

In 2007, one missile strike left one militant dead while the year 2010 was the deadliest when the attacks had left more than 423 terrorists dead. In 2008, 23 drone strikes killed 152 militants, 12 of them were foreigners or affiliated with Al Qaeda.

In 2009, around 20 predator strikes were carried out, killing 179 militants, including 20 foreigners, and in the following year 423 militants, including 133 foreigners, were killed in 103 strikes. In attacks till March 7 this year, 39 militants, including five foreigners, were killed.

Maj-Gen Ghayur, who is in-charge of troops in North Waziristan, admitted that the drone attacks had negative fallout, scaring the local population and causing their migration to other places. Gen Ghayur said the drone attacks also had social and political repercussions and law-enforcement agencies often felt the heat. 146

A subsequent article in Dawn also applauded the frank tone set by General Mehmood: “Is the army hinting that the strikes are a useful and precise tactic in neutralizing identified militants and terrorists? If that is the case, then the military and political leaders should publicly change their stated position and matters should move on—the battle against local and foreign terrorists hiding in the country’s north-western regions is far from over.” 147