Brian Williams - Predators

It was like a factory that had been recruiting nine- to 12-year-old boys, and turning them into suicide bombers. The computers, other equipment and literature seized from the place give graphic details of the training process in this so-called “nursery.” There are videos of young boys carrying out executions, a classroom where 10- to 12-year olds are sitting in formations, with white band of Quranic verses wrapped around their forehead, and there are training videos to show how improvised explosive devices are made and detonated. 7

Qari Hussain also trained Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani American who tried to set off a car bomb in a civilian-packed Times Square.

In response to such outrages the Pakistani government put an approximately $600,000 bounty on Hussain’s head and began a hunt for him in South Waziristan. In desperation the Pakistanis asked the Americans for help, and the CIA made several attempts to kill Hussain with a drone. As the U.S. drones hunted Qari Hussain and his fellow suicide-bombing trainers, a Pakistani wrote a letter to his country’s primary English-language newspaper, Dawn , in support of the drone strikes. He also pointed out the hypocrisy of Pakistanis who reflexively protested the U.S. drone strikes for accidentally causing collateral damage deaths in their hunt for terrorists but who did not protest against suicide bombers for purposefully killing civilians. This author wrote,

When American pilotless aircraft, the drones, zero in on and attack the masterminds of these suicide attacks, in the tribal area, the religio-political parties raise a storm of protest on the grounds that the sovereignty of Pakistan has been threatened. The media too, inadvertently, follows the line of the religio-political parties and creates a hype and makes it look as if the Americans have done great harm to Pakistan while the other set of foreigners, i.e. Arab, Chechen, Uzbek militants, have played no role in a persistent effort to destabilize Pakistan.

Probably, the media and, in turn, the general public forget that the vast majority of the militant leaders that plan suicide attacks inside Pakistan are the former students of the seminaries controlled by the very leaders who are in the forefront to raise a storm of protests when an isolated drone attack takes place by the Americans. But these leaders observe absolute silence when the militants carry out suicide attacks that inflict devastating damage on Pakistan’s human and material assets.

Seen neutrally, it will dawn on critics of the drone attacks that the Americans are assisting Pakistan by annihilating the masterminds that sit in the tribal areas, plan, prepare and dispatch suicide attackers who play havoc with life and property in the urban Pakistan. 8

Another person, who supported the drone strikes for the same reason, posted a comment on Dawn ’s website: “Innocent women and children are also dying in our neighborhoods, kindergarten schools and in our shopping malls in suicide attacks. I don’t think they deserve to die either. I guess drone attacks are good as long as they [are] killing those terrorists and terrorist sympathizers. Maybe you will understand this when somebody from your neighborhood dies in a suicide attack.” 9

A third Pakistani wrote in Dawn similarly condemning the suicide bombers while condoning the drones:

Why would the people under Taliban and Al Qaeda occupation and oppression not cheer when these murderers are killed? What does not make sense is the chorus of protests over these drone attacks emanating from people like Imran Khan and Hamid Gul—to name only two—who claim to speak for the people of the tribal areas. What exactly is their agenda, and why are they acting as cheerleaders for these terrorists?

I have often wondered about this callous hypocrisy too. If we condemn the Americans so vociferously over the drone campaign, should we not be more critical of the thugs who are killing far more Pakistani civilians? And yet, it seems that our more popular Urdu anchorpersons and TV chat show guests reserve their outrage for Washington, while giving the Taliban and Al Qaeda a free pass over their vicious suicide bombings that have taken hundreds of innocent lives in recent weeks.

Why then are we silent over the daily killings of fellow Pakistanis by the TTP and other terror groups, while frothing at the mouth over the drone attacks? Clearly, this irrational and double-faced reaction is based in the anti-American sentiment that has taken root in Pakistan. 10

As the drones hunted Qari Hussain, some in Pakistan saw the CIA’s remote-control killers as an ally in the struggle against the scourge of suicide-bombing terrorism. After the 2009 killing of Baitullah Mehsud, Pakistani president Ali Zardari declared, “Due to his death the Taliban leadership is in disarray, the major suicide bombing network and Taliban patronage has been disrupted. Acts of terror have considerably decreased in the border area.” 11This sort of acknowledgment of the drones’ usefulness may have increased when it was reported that a CIA drone tracked and blew up a Taliban suicide-bombing truck packed with explosives before it could reach its intended target. 12

As the debate continued, on October 4, 2010, the drones finally found Qari Hussain and fired on his vehicle. Hussain was injured in the strike, and three of his guards were killed. Three days later the Teacher of Suicide Bombers himself was finally killed in a second drone strike. As they had after Baitullah Mehsud was killed, many Pakistanis quietly celebrated the death of the man who had killed so many of their people with his suicide bombers. The Pakistani Express Tribune published the comments of readers who wrote in to celebrate the CIA drone assassination of Hussain. Their commentary demonstrates that not everyone in Pakistan was loudly opposed to the drone strikes on the Taliban; some clearly supported them. Some of the readers’ comments follow:

If this news is true then God Bless America and God Bless the drones. He blew people into pieces and he got blown into bits and pieces. Good riddance!

Wonderful news, if confirmed. This guy had the blood of thousands of innocent Muslims and Pakistanis on his hand. Good riddance to bad rubbish. Drone attacks may be wrong but they are effective and precise compared to full-fledged army onslaught which normally has more collateral damage.

I wish the drones could pick these guys up so that they could be hanged in public.

Yet another triumph of allied forces in the war on terror. Much of the elite leadership of these terrorists has either been killed or captured as a result of joined efforts by the allied forces.

If true, this would be an achievement on the scale of eliminating Baitullah Mehsud. This Qari Mehsud was the “Ustad-e-Fedayeen,” the master trainer of suicide bombers. Unfortunately this cockroach has been reported killed before, most recently in January, only to pop up later in a video and resume his threats and vile ways.

Bravo! Drone attacks will have to continue if we want Pakistan to be free of these monster Jihadis.

The successful drone strike on Qari Hussain took out a key Taliban terrorist whose primary mission was to kill civilians with suicide bombings and is as positive a testimony for the drone campaign as any. The killing of Hussain may have saved the lives of hundreds, if not thousands, of Pakistanis. It also reaffirmed the message that the CIA had been sending to the militants: that they had gone from being the hunters to the hunted.

The Israelis, who also have a drone program and a long history of hunting their enemies for assassination, have also found that their killing campaigns have had a profound disruptive effect on terrorist activities. According to Daniel Byman,