Soon we will launch an attack in Washington that will amaze everyone in the world.
—Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud
It is perhaps the worst-kept secret in the war on terror. In 2004 the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) launched what amounts to an all-out airborne war, its most extensive assassination campaign since the Vietnam War, against Taliban and al Qaeda members hiding out in Pakistan’s wild tribal zones. Thousands have been assassinated in this covert bombing campaign, which is being waged by remote-control drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), known as Predators and the more advanced Reapers. These high-tech weapons in the sky have indisputably killed hundreds of al Qaeda and Taliban leaders who are actively planning new terrorist attacks on the American homeland or on Coalition troops in neighboring Afghanistan. Whether acting in a “force protection” role against Taliban insurgents trying to cross the Afghan-Pakistani border and attack U.S. and Coalition troops operating in Afghanistan or attempting to disrupt al Qaeda’s future acts of mass-casualty terrorism, the UAV drones are merciless and efficient killers. The enemy never knows when or where the machays (“wasps,” as they are known in the local Pashtun language) are going to strike next and lives in constant fear of being incinerated by Hellfire missiles fired by high-flying UAVs that are barely visible from the ground.
With their ability to loiter for up to twenty-four hours and use high-resolution cameras to follow their targets from afar, the UAV drones have added a level of precision to this bombing campaign that has never been seen in previous aerial campaigns. Whereas in earlier bombing campaigns high-flying jets dropped clumsy, unguided five-hundred-to-two-thousand-pound “dumb bombs” on their targets, the slower propeller-driven Predators and Reapers hover over their targets, track their “pattern-of-life movements” with high-resolution and infrared cameras, and fire smaller missiles and mini-bombs that are guided by lasers or satellites.
But as precise as they may be, the drones’ Hellfire or Scorpion missiles and Paveway guided bombs have also killed civilian bystanders. Scores of Pakistani tribesmen whose only crime was to be near a targeted al Qaeda convoy or Taliban hujra (compound or guest house) have been killed as unintentional collateral damage. The killing of Pakistani citizens on Pakistani soil by distrusted foreigners has, not surprisingly, caused a backlash of anti-Americanism in this proud country. The paradox then is that America’s most effective tool in killing high-value al Qaeda and Taliban targets may also be driving average Pakistanis to see the United States as their enemy. This could undermine the unstable pro-American government in this sprawling nuclear-armed country of 190 million people and inadvertently help recruit new terrorists.
This conundrum is best illustrated by the drone hunt to kill Pakistan’s most wanted man, Baitullah Mehsud. Mehsud was the leader of a coalition of Pakistani Taliban groups known as the Tehrek e Taliban e Pakistan (TTP). In 2007 Mehsud declared war on Pakistan and began to send waves of suicide bombers against Pakistani targets from his remote hideout in the mountainous tribal zones of Pakistan’s northwestern border with Afghanistan.1 These suicide bombers eventually killed thousands of Pakistanis.2 In one year alone (2009) Pakistani sources claimed that more than three thousand Pakistanis were killed by the Taliban.3 The murderous campaign was a slow-motion version of al Qaeda’s 2001 attack on the United States, and by 2008 Pakistan had surpassed Iraq as the number-one target for suicide bombers. No one seemed safe from the Pakistani Taliban terrorist mastermind who had no compunction about deliberately killing men, women, and children in his war against the “pro-American puppet” government of Pakistan.
Among Mehsud’s most famous victims was the former president of Pakistan, the wildly popular Benazir Bhutto, who had just returned from exile bravely promising to stand up to the Taliban “cancer” that was devouring her country. Although many conspiracy-oriented Pakistanis have blamed everyone from the Israelis to the Pakistani government itself for killing Bhutto in December 2007, Mehsud had loudly promised he would kill her if she returned to Pakistan, and he appears to have fulfilled his promise.4 Upon hearing of her death at the hands of his assassins, he is reported to have gloated, “Fantastic job. Very brave boys, the ones who killed her.”5
But Bhutto was not the only one to die in Mehsud’s bloody terror campaign. Mehsud’s fedayeen (suicide bombers) entered holy Sufi-mystic shrines, hospitals, factories, anti-Taliban jirgas (tribal meetings), mosques, Pakistani army and Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) bases, a Marriott hotel, polling stations, police recruitment posts, political rallies, refugee camps, and other public places and detonated themselves, slaughtering and maiming countless civilians. The unprecedented slaughter was a shock to many Pakistanis who had previously been tolerant of the Taliban. Mehsud’s objective seemed to be to shatter Pakistani civil society just as the insurgents had previously done in Iraq.
Although the Pakistani army made several halfhearted efforts to enter the untamed mountainous region from which Mehsud ran his terrorist state in the tribal province of South Waziristan, they were seemingly incapable of conquering his rugged realm. In fact, Mehsud’s hardy Taliban fighters beat the Pakistani army in several battles, on one occasion capturing more than two hundred Pakistani soldiers and beheading several of them on video.6 One of the oppressed people of South Waziristan claimed, “South Waziristan now seems like a state within the state, and Baitullah Mehsud is running this like a head of government. Now he’s an all-powerful man whose writ and command is visible across the tribal belt.”7
In his breakaway western realm Mehsud’s followers began to enforce a strict version of Islamic shariah law that was similar to the draconian system enforced by the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan prior to 2001’s Operation Enduring Freedom. Movie theaters, DVD stores, and girls’ schools were burned, television sets were destroyed as “satanic devices,” women caught in adultery (often something as innocuous as being caught in public with a man who was not their husband) were publicly stoned to death, those accused of stealing were arbitrarily executed, tribal leaders known as maliks were killed, men were forced to grow long Taliban-style beards, and a gloom settled on the province of South Waziristan and neighboring tribal regions conquered by the Pakistani Taliban. In essence, the secular system of Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and the laws of Pakistan had been overturned in Mehsud’s mini-Talibanistan. The darkness of the Afghan Taliban had simply migrated across the border to the Pakistani tribal zone once the Americans invaded Afghanistan.
For many Pakistanis who saw South Waziristan and the other wild Pashtun tribal lands on the northwestern frontier as an autonomous realm (known as the Federally Administered Tribal Agencies, or FATA) that had not really been a part of Pakistan proper, the de facto secession of this territory was not alarming. India, not fellow Muslims, was after all perceived as the main threat to Pakistan, regardless of how fanatical those Muslims might be. The “Talibanization” of Pakistan alarmed the Americans, whose newly elected president, Barack Obama, described this process of radicalization as “a cancer that risks killing Pakistan from within” more than it harmed the somnolent Pakistanis who had previously sponsored the Taliban.8
But the Taliban militants were not satisfied with terrorizing average Pashtun tribesmen in the FATA or carving out fundamentalist theocracies in the remote tribal agencies, and they began to move from their autonomous border provinces into Pakistan proper in 2008. Their tribal followers rose up in the scenic mountain province of Swat Valley, which is located about a hundred miles to the northwest of the Pakistani capital of Islamabad. In this former tourist resort area, they similarly carved out a Taliban-style militant state and began beheading police, burning girls’ schools and beating girls on video, and enforcing strict Islamic law.9
The videos of the unbearably gruesome beheadings and floggings went viral in Pakistan and finally began to disturb average Pakistanis who had previously been strangely willing to overlook the Taliban’s brutality.10 The violence had come too close to home. By 2009 the Taliban had begun to spread from the Swat Valley to neighboring Buner Province. No one knew where the terrorists would stop. For the India-obsessed Pakistanis, Mehsud and his Taliban vigilantes had finally come to be seen as a national threat.
At this time the desperate Pakistani government began to ask the United States to use its Predator and Reaper drones, which had been targeting al Qaeda and exiled Afghan Taliban leaders in Pakistan’s tribal zones, to kill the man Pakistani officials described as “the mother of all evil.”11 The Americans were only too happy to oblige their allies and had reasons of their own to seek the demise of Pakistan’s most wanted man. Whereas Mehsud’s Pakistani Taliban were mainly engaged in terrorism and war against the Pakistani state, one of the group’s subcommanders, Hakimullah Mehsud, had been attacking U.S. supply convoys traveling through the nearby tribal agency of Khyber to bring supplies to American and Coalition troops serving in Afghanistan.12 Plus, the Americans had been stung by a persistent rumor among paranoid Pakistanis that the United States was somehow sponsoring Baitullah Mehsud to create an excuse for conquering their state and gaining access to their prized nuclear weapons.13 If this were not enough, Mehsud had also promised, “Soon we will launch an attack in Washington that will amaze everyone in the world.”14 Washington and Islamabad agreed that something had to be done about Mehsud.
Thus began the hunt for the notorious Taliban mass murderer. American troops were not allowed on Pakistan’s sovereign territory so the drones were the obvious choice for taking Mehsud out. According to one study, more than a dozen U.S. drone strikes were eventually conducted against Mehsud and his followers once it was decided to assassinate him. But the elusive Mehsud seemed to be impossible to kill.15 He moved from hujra to hujra and rarely gave interviews to outsiders as some of his more media-savvy comrades were known to do. Finding Mehsud in the autonomous mountainous tribal agency of South Waziristan, which was inhabited by almost a half million Pashtun tribesmen, was a Herculean task.
Then, on June 23, 2009, the CIA caught a break when it learned that Mehsud would be attending a funeral in the village of Najmarai in the Makeen District of South Waziristan to commemorate the earlier drone assassination of one of his top lieutenants, named Niaz Wali. CIA drones were scrambled to the scene and sent images to their U.S.-based remote pilots from their high-resolution cameras of the crowd gathered at the funeral. Pakistani spies working for the CIA indicated that the notoriously reclusive Mehsud had blundered and would indeed be in attendance at the funeral along with some of his top commanders. He was somewhere in the crowd of militants and villagers who had gathered to provide a Muslim burial for Niaz Wali and several other slain Taliban fighters. Rarely had so many Taliban leaders gathered in one place at the same time. Although the CIA had previously been comparatively selective in its targeting for fear of killing bystanders and upsetting their Pakistani allies, the decision was made to launch an attack on the funeral. Mehsud was too high value a target for both the Pakistanis and Americans to let him escape. No one in the CIA knew when they would have the chance to kill him again, so the order to fire was given.
Within minutes the remote pilots’ screens back at CIA Headquarters in Langley were filled with the images of explosions as the drones’ AGM-114 Hellfire antiarmor missiles slammed into the gathered crowd. As the smoke cleared, the CIA drone operators would have doubtless seen many “squirters” (i.e., survivors fleeing the explosions) as well as numerous dead and dying people lying scattered around the detonation zone (known as “bugsplats” in CIA parlance). But the drones were not done. According to one source, the drones subsequently fired missiles at Taliban members attempting to flee the scene of the attack in sport utility vehicles (SUVs), killing several more.16
Having decimated the funeral, the remote-control drones then flew back to their bases, located to the south, in the Pakistani province of Baluchistan, and the CIA waited for human intelligence (humint) to tell them whether they had killed Mehsud or any of his top leadership.
It did not take long for reports to come from the agency. Even though Pakistani and foreign journalists were denied access to this remote region, word began to trickle out that between sixty and seventy people had been killed in the missile strikes. This was the second deadliest drone strike in the ongoing campaign (the first took place in 2006 in the town of Damadola).
Then came the unfortunate news: for all the mayhem, Mehsud was not among those killed. Minutes before the strike, he had left the funeral and thus avoided the fate of several of his top commanders, who were blown up by the missiles. Mehsud had reportedly been so close to the explosion that it had damaged his car.17 Among those who were not so lucky was a notorious leader named Sangeen Khan, who was the Pakistani Taliban’s top commander in Afghanistan.
Members of the Taliban were not the only ones killed. According to one Pakistani source half of those killed in the strike were villagers.18 Another local source claimed that of the sixty-seven people killed in the explosion eighteen had been villagers.19 For their part, the Taliban, which had cause to inflate the number of dead civilians, claimed that only five of its members had been killed; the rest of the casualties were bystanders.
As with most of the CIA’s strikes on the Taliban, it was difficult to nail down the details of who had died in this remote zone. One eyewitness who lost a leg in the strike reported, “After the prayers ended people were asking each other to leave the area as drones were hovering. First two drones fired two missiles, it created havoc, there was smoke and dust everywhere. Injured people were crying and asking for help. … They fired the third missile after a minute, and I fell on the ground.”20
Regardless of what portion of the victims comprised civilian bystanders, it was the second highest death toll from a drone strike to date. Surprisingly, although there had been protest marches against previous drone strikes—most notably after the aforementioned Damadola strike—on this occasion there seemed to be little outrage in Pakistan at the killing of so many people at a funeral. Many in the pro-Taliban Islamist political parties grumbled about the sacrilege of attacking a funeral, but by this time most Pakistanis were willing to countenance the unpopular CIA drone strikes if it would rid them of Mehsud.
So the drone hunt continued. In the succeeding weeks and months the Pakistanis worked hand in glove with the CIA to track down the elusive Mehsud. The CIA launched several strikes on Mehsud’s followers in an effort to kill him, but he never seemed to be at the scene of the attack.
Then, in August 2009 the CIA got lucky. Word came out of South Waziristan that Mehsud had married a second wife with the aim of having a male child after his first wife had given him only daughters. CIA and ISI spies determined who the woman was and found that she was the daughter of local cleric named Ikramuddin Mehsud. The trackers now had the scent of the prey. On the night of August 5, the CIA learned that Baitullah Mehsud, who was a diabetic, had traveled to his father-in-law’s house in the village of Zanghara because he was feeling ill.
When a drone was sent to the scene, the CIA pilots flying the plane from seven thousand miles away in the United States were shocked to see images of several people gathered on the roof of the father-in-law’s house. The man in the center of the crowd was receiving a glucose drip while his bodyguards looked on. Mehsud was known to be a diabetic; the man had to be him. This was the opportunity of a lifetime for the CIA pilots. The order was given to fire Hellfire missiles. Once again the CIA screens in distant America were lit up with explosions as the precision-guided missiles slammed into the unsuspecting people on the clay house below. The ultimate combination of humint and technological intelligence (techint) had called forth a “decapitation strike.”
Then the smoke cleared. Although the CIA pilots could not be sure, it looked as if everyone on the roof, including seven bodyguards, Mehsud’s new wife, and Baitullah Mehsud himself, was dead. Having expended its ammunition, the Predator drone turned and flew back to its base in the south while its handlers awaited news from distant Pakistan on the fate of the target.
It did not take long for word to emerge from South Waziristan. On the following day rumors began to spread that someone important had indeed been killed in the strike—Mehsud’s wife. By that evening newspapers around the globe were publishing stories about the killing of the terrorist mastermind’s wife.21 Panicked Pakistanis feared a wave of suicide bombings as revenge for her death while Taliban leaders denied that Mehsud himself had been killed.
Then word of a large funeral to be held in the village the next day trickled out from the Taliban-controlled territory. A woman would never merit such an honor among the conservative Pashtun tribesmen of South Waziristan. It had to be someone more important than Mehsud’s wife. A Taliban spokesman delivered the stunning news: With great sadness he announced that Mehsud had achieved “martyrdom.” Pakistan’s most wanted man was finally dead. Almost simultaneously a Pakistani military spokesman announced that he had actually seen the kill video filmed by the very drone that had fired on Mehsud. The Pakistani source claimed, “This is one hundred per cent. We have no doubt about his death. He is dead and buried.” According to this source, “He was clearly visible with his wife. And the missile hit the target as it was. His torso remained, while half of the body was blown up.”22
There were no public outcries from Pakistanis about CIA violations of sovereignty on this occasion. On the contrary, many Pakistanis secretly celebrated. The Pakistani newspaper Dawn ran a headline celebrating the death of Mehsud that read, “Good Riddance, Killer Baitullah.”23 One blogger from the Pakistani port city of Karachi claimed, “If [his death is] true, it would be good news and shows the value of drone attacks,” and another wrote, “The mass murderer has met his fate. He was responsible for the death of thousands of innocent Pakistanis. May he burn in hell for eternity.”24
The Americans were no less jubilant. President Barack Obama, who had stepped up the drone attacks soon after taking office, announced with grim satisfaction that the United States had “taken out” the terrorist chief. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said, “Baitullah Mehsud is somebody who has well earned his label as a murderous thug. If he is dead, without a doubt the people of Pakistan will be safer as a result.”25 Roger Cressey, a former counterterrorism official on the National Security Council, said, “Mehsud was someone both we and Pakistan were happy to see go up in smoke.”26
But those who thought the Pakistani Taliban had been beheaded by Baitullah’s death were to be disappointed, for the terrorist group quickly held a shura (council meeting) and chose as Baitullah Mehsud’s successor the fearsome Hakimullah Mehsud. As previously mentioned, Hakimullah Mehsud was a Taliban subcommander who had gained fame by attacking U.S. and Coalition supply convoys traveling through the Khyber Agency to Afghanistan. The new Pakistani Taliban chief lost no time in declaring his “love and affection” for America’s number-one enemy, Osama bin Laden, and promised swift revenge on the CIA for the death of his friend and predecessor, Baitullah Mehsud.27
Hakimullah ended his message to the Americans by criticizing them for imprisoning Muslims in Abu Ghraib, Iraq, and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and predicted, “If America continues to attack the innocent people of the tribal areas then we are forced to attack America.” Then he added, “We will make new plans to attack them. You prepare for jihad and this is the time of jihad.”28 In essence Hakimullah was invoking the ancient Pashtun tribal code of badal, which calls for eye for an eye revenge against one’s enemies, regardless of the cost.
Events were to show that Hakimullah’s call for vengeance against the CIA murderers of his former mentor, Baitullah Mehsud, and countless other Taliban and Pashtun tribesmen were no mere words. Hakimullah eventually kept his promise by killing a CIA station chief linked to the drone attacks and seven of her fellow officers. But the feud did not end there. Hakimullah’s commander who was in charge of the revenge attack on the CIA would later be killed by a drone. Hakimullah himself was later reported wounded in the legs and abdomen, but not killed, in a subsequent drone strike.29
Thus the cycle of violence in the rugged mountains of the Afghan-Pakistani border perpetuated itself in a way that many previous conquering states and empires had experienced over the centuries. How many other Pashtuns had similarly declared badal on the United States as a result of the bloody drone campaign against Baitullah Mehsud no one knew. How many innocents had been killed in the numerous strikes on him and his followers before he was finally assassinated? Were the Americans making more enemies than they could kill, or were they simply using the most advanced means at their disposal to eradicate dangerous men who were committed to causing future slaughter and terrorism? No one seemed to know the answers to these important questions.
While the debate on these issues has been driven by extremes (the arguments that on the one hand, “drones make more enemies than they kill” and, on the other, “they are an unprecedented means for killing al Qaeda and Taliban members”), this book will try to find a middle ground. It will do so by analyzing the wider issues involved in the drone attacks, such as the unique history of the Pashtun tribal areas, Pakistani relations with the Taliban and the United States, the development of the armed drones, Pakistani reactions to the drone strikes, and Taliban and al Qaeda responses. By looking at all aspects of the issue, one can construct a three-dimensional picture of this murky assassination campaign that is still not fully understood even by those carrying it out or those suffering from it.
Before these issues can be explored the reader must first, however, make a crucial background journey into the missing history of the remote Pashtun territory where the drone strikes have been carried out, the FATA. It is only by understanding the culture and history of this autonomous land that one can understand the ebb and flow of the drone war that is taking place on and above it.