By Gareth Porter*
WASHINGTON, Oct 18, 2010 (IPS) - New information on the Central
Intelligence Agency's campaign of drone strikes in northwest Pakistan
directly contradicts the image the Barack Obama administration and the
CIA have sought to establish in the news media of a programme based on
highly accurate targeting that is effective in disrupting al Qaeda's
terrorist plots against the United States.
A new report on civilian casualties in the war in Pakistan has
revealed direct evidence that a house was targeted for a drone attack
merely because it had been visited by a group of Taliban soldiers.
The report came shortly after publication of the results of a survey
of opinion within the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of
Pakistan showing overwhelming popular opposition to the drone strikes
and majority support for suicide attacks on U.S. forces under some
circumstances.
Meanwhile, data on targeting of the drone strikes in Pakistan indicate
that they have now become primarily an adjunct of the U.S. war in
Afghanistan, targeting almost entirely militant groups involved in the
Afghan insurgency rather than al Qaeda officials involved in plotting
global terrorism.
The new report published by the Campaign for Innocent Victims in
Conflict (CIVIC) last week offers the first glimpse of the drone
strikes based on actual interviews with civilian victims of the
strikes.
In an interview with a researcher for CIVIC, a civilian victim of a
drone strike in North Waziristan carried out during the Obama
administration recounted how his home had been visited by Taliban
troops asking for lunch. He said he had agreed out of fear of refusing
them.
The very next day, he recalled, the house was destroyed by a missile
from a drone, killing his only son.
The CIVIC researcher, Christopher Rogers, investigated nine of the 139
drone strikes carried out since the beginning of 2009 and found that a
total of 30 civilians had been killed in those strikes, including 14
women and children.
If that average rate of 3.33 civilian casualties for each drone
bombing is typical of all the strikes since the rules for the strikes
were loosened in early 2008, it would suggest that roughly 460
civilians have been killed in the drone campaign during that period.
The total number of deaths from the drone war in Pakistan since early
2008 is unknown, but has been estimated by Peter Bergen and Katherine
Tiedemann of the New America Foundation at between 1,109 and 1,734.
Only 66 leading officials in al Qaeda or other anti-U.S. groups have
been killed in the bombings. Reports on the bombings have listed the
vast majority of the victims as "militants", without further
explanation.
The victim's account of a drone attack based on the flimsiest
rationale is consistent with the revelation in New York Times reporter
David Sanger's book "The Inheritance" that the CIA was given much
greater freedom in early 2008 to hit targets that might well involve
killing innocent civilians.
The original rationale of the drone campaign was to "decapitate" al
Qaeda by targeting a list of high-ranking al Qaeda officials. The
rules of engagement required firm evidence that there were no
civilians at the location who would be killed by the strike.
But in January 2008 the CIA persuaded President George W. Bush to
approve a set of "permissions" proposed by the CIA that same month
which allowed the agency to target locations rather than identified al
Qaeda leaders if those locations were linked to a "signature" – a
pattern of behaviour on the part of al Qaeda officials that had been
observed over time.
That meant the CIA could now bomb a motorcade or a house if it was
believed to be linked to al Qaeda, without identifying any particular
individual target.
A high-ranking Bush administration national security official told
Sanger that Bush later authorised even further widening of the power
of the CIA's operations directorate to make life or death decisions
based on inferences rather than hard evidence. The official
acknowledged that giving the CIA so much latitude was "risky", because
"you can make more mistakes - you can hit the wrong house, or
misidentify the motorcade."
The extraordinary power ceded to the CIA operations directorate under
the programme provoked serious concerns in the intelligence community,
according to one former intelligence official. It allowed that
directorate to collect the intelligence on potential targets in the
FATA, interpret its own intelligence and then make lethal decisions
based on that interpretation – all without any outside check on the
judgments it was making, even from CIA's own directorate of
intelligence.
Officials from other intelligence agencies have sought repeatedly to
learn more about how the operations directorate was making targeting
decisions but were rebuffed, according to the source.
Some national security officials, including mid-level officials
involved in the drone programme itself, have warned in the past that
the drone strikes have increased anti-Americanism and boosted
recruitment for the Pakistani Taliban and al Qaeda. New support for
that conclusion has now come from the results of a survey of opinion
on the strikes in FATA published by the New American Foundation and
Terror Free Tomorrow.
The survey shows that 76 percent of the 1,000 FATA residents surveyed
oppose drone strikes and that nearly half of those surveyed believe
they kill mostly civilians.
Sixty percent of those surveyed believed that suicide bombings against
the U.S. military are "often or sometimes justified".
Meanwhile, data on the targeting of drone strikes make it clear that
the programme, which the Obama administration and the CIA have
justified as effective in disrupting al Qaeda terrorism, is now
focused on areas where Afghan and Pakistani militants are engaged in
the war in Afghanistan.
Most al Qaeda leaders and the Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah
Mehsud, who has been closely allied with al Qaeda against the
Pakistani government, have operated in South Waziristan.
North Waziristan is where the Haqqani network provides safe havens to
Pashtun insurgents fighting U.S.-NATO troops in Afghanistan. It is
also where Hafiz Gul Bahadur, leader of a Pakistani Taliban faction
who has called for supporting the Afghan insurgency rather than jihad
against the Pakistani government, operates.
In 2009, just over half the drone strikes were still carried out in
South Waziristan. But in 2010, 90 percent of the 86 drone strikes
carried out thus far have been in North Waziristan, according to data
collected by Bill Roggio and Alexander Mayer and published on the
website of the Long War Journal, which supports the drone campaign.
The dramatic shift in targeting came after al Qaeda officials were
reported to have fled from South Waziristan to Karachi and other major
cities.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration was privately acknowledging that
the war would be a failure unless the Pakistani military changed its
policy of giving the Haqqani network a safe haven in North Waziristan.
When asked whether the drone campaign was now primarily about the war
in Afghanistan rather than al Qaeda terrorism, Peter Bergin of the New
America Foundation's Counterterrorism Strategy Initiative told IPS, "I
think that's a reasonable conclusion."
Bergin has defended the drone campaign in the past as "the only game
in town" in combating terrorism by al Qaeda.
*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist
specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition
of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the
Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.
--
Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear
of punishment and hope of reward after death." --
Albert Einstein !!!
http://www.scribd.com/doc/22151765/History-of-Pakistan-Army-from-1757-to-1971
http://www.scribd.com/doc/21686885/TALIBAN-WAR-IN-AFGHANISTAN
http://www.scribd.com/doc/22455178/Letters-to-Command-and-Staff-College-Quetta-Citadel-Journal
http://www.scribd.com/doc/23150027/Pakistan-Army-through-eyes-of-Pakistani-Generals
http://www.scribd.com/doc/23701412/War-of-Independence-of-1857
http://www.scribd.com/doc/22457862/Pakistan-Army-Journal-The-Citadel
http://www.scribd.com/doc/21952758/1971-India-Pakistan-War
http://www.scribd.com/doc/25171703/BOOK-REVIEWS-BY-AGHA-H-AMIN
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