The CIA's Silent War In Pakistan

By Mark Thompson/Washington
Monday, Jun. 01, 2009
Courtesy Of Time Magazine

The wilds of Waziristan, the tribal belt along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan, make an unlikely showcase for the future of warfare. This is a land stuck in the past: there are few roads, electricity is scarce, and entire communities of ethnic Pashtun tribesmen live as they have for millenniums. And yet it is over this medieval landscape that the U.S. has deployed some of the most sophisticated killing machines ever created, against an enemy that has survived or evaded all other weaponry. If al-Qaeda and the Taliban could not be eliminated by tanks, gunships and missiles, then perhaps they can be stamped out by CIA-operated unmanned drone aircraft, the Predator and the Reaper. (See a diagram of a Reaper here.)

That was the bet President George W. Bush placed during his final months in office, when the CIA greatly increased drone sorties and strikes in Pakistan. The accelerated attacks have been stepped up under President Barack Obama. Nowadays, the low hum of the drones has become a familiar sound in Waziristan, where tribesmen call them machay, or red bees. Their lethal sting has been felt in villages and hamlets across the Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA). The main objectives of the campaign: to take out al-Qaeda's top tier of leadership, including Osama bin Laden, and deny sanctuary in FATA for the Taliban and those fighters who routinely slip across the border to attack U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Combining high-tech video surveillance with the ability to deliver deadly fire, drones allow joystick-wielding operators on the far side of the world--Creech Air Force Base, near Las Vegas--to track moving targets in real time and destroy them. All this, without spilling American blood and for a small fraction of the cost of conventional battle.

But is the drone war winnable? The White House routinely dodges questions on the subject, and neither the CIA nor the State Department would talk about the program on the record. But officials familiar with the CIA's operations say at least nine of the top 20 high-value al-Qaeda targets identified last fall have been killed by drone strikes, along with dozens of lesser figures. Many bases and safe houses have been destroyed. On the other hand, Pakistani officials say the majority of strikes have either missed their targets or, worse, killed innocent civilians. The News, a Pakistani daily, reported recently that 60 strikes since early 2006 had killed 687 civilians and only 14 al-Qaeda leaders, a ratio few Pakistanis would find acceptable. The campaign, in fact, may be contributing to a swelling of anti-American sentiment in Pakistan and weakening the fragile government of President Asif Ali Zardari.

Moreover, while the drones may seem a technological marvel and strategic asset to those waging the campaign on the American side, they don't impress the local tribesmen. On the contrary, they feed a perception that the U.S. is a cowardly enemy, too frightened to shed blood in battle. "The militants say that if the Americans want to come and fight, they should fight them face to face," says Mahmood Shah, a retired brigadier who was once the top Pakistani official in FATA. Shah, a Pashtun himself, says the families of the drones' victims are required under the tribal code to seek revenge, which makes them ideal recruits for militant leaders like Baitullah Mehsud, the Pashtun commander of the Pakistani Taliban. Mehsud, says Shah, "likes to boast that each drone attack brings him three or four suicide bombers."

Cheap and Deadly

The Predator and the Reaper are both made by General Atomics, a San Diego defense contractor. The Predator is the older of the two; the first one was delivered to the Air Force in 1994. By the end of the 1990s, the CIA was using it to track bin Laden. Capable of flying for up to 40 hours without refueling, the drone was a "brilliant intelligence tool," recalls Hank Crumpton, then the CIA's top covert-operations man in Afghanistan. Although the CIA was keen to weaponize the drone early on, the Air Force resisted the idea until 2000. Even then, firing the weapons was another matter. Crumpton remembers watching someone he is convinced was bin Laden on a video feed from a Predator in late 2000. "The optics were not great, but it was him," Crumpton says. But back then, "there were too many political, legal and military constraints," and the CIA couldn't simply pull the trigger. The equation changed after 9/11. The Predator drew blood for the first time on Nov. 5, 2002, when it destroyed an SUV in Yemen, killing six men, including a top local al-Qaeda leader. (See a diagram of a Reaper here.)

The Predator's firepower is limited, but the Reaper can deliver laser-guided 500-lb. bombs like those commonly found on the F-16 jet, together with Hellfire missiles. And the hardware comes relatively cheap. The Reaper costs $10 million--chump change compared with manned fighter aircraft; the cutting-edge F-22 Raptor, for instance, costs nearly $350 million. The drones' relatively low cost is due mainly to the fact that they don't have a pilot--which may also contribute to the Pakistani leadership's tacit acceptance of the CIA campaign. "If we were sending F-16s into FATA--American pilots in Pakistani airspace--they might have felt very differently," says James Currie, a military historian at the U.S.'s National Defense University.

By staring at hours of video footage of houses, vehicles and people, analysts looking at screens in Nevada can detect "patterns of life analyses," or timelines of movements and meetings in any given area. But the drones' utility is dramatically enhanced when analysts know exactly what they're looking for and where. For that, there's nothing better than human intelligence. Reports from Waziristan suggest the CIA has access to a network of spies. Tribesmen have told TIME of agents who drop microchips (locally known as patrai) near targets; the drones can lock onto these to guide their missiles or bombs with pinpoint precision. But it has proved difficult to verify these claims of human assets and their homing chips.

The drones are far from infallible, however. They can survey only small patches of territory at a time, and it would take thousands of them to cover every nook and cranny of Pakistan's long frontier. Several crashes have been reported. Thermal cameras are notoriously imperfect. Even under ideal conditions, images can be blurry. In one of several stills from drone video seen by TIME, it's hard to tell if a group of men is kneeling in prayer or the men are militants in battle formation. "The basic problem with all aerial reconnaissance is that it's subject to error," says George Friedman, who heads the security firm Stratfor. "But in a place like Pakistan, errors have enormous political consequences."

The Political Cost

That they do. Critics of the drones ask if it makes sense for the U.S. to use them when every strike inflames Pakistani public opinion against a pro-U.S. government that is at the point of collapse. "If we wind up killing a whole bunch of al-Qaeda leaders and, at the same time, Pakistan implodes, that's not a victory for us," says David Kilcullen, a counterterrorism expert who played a key role in developing the surge strategy in Iraq. "It's possible the political cost of these attacks exceeds the tactical gains." And yet Pakistani leaders like army Chief of Staff General Ashfaq Kayani seem to have concluded that using drones to kill terrorists in FATA is generally a good thing. This is a major change in direction; although former President Pervez Musharraf allowed drones to operate, he placed severe limits on where and when they could strike. After Musharraf resigned last summer, the shackles came off. The U.S. struck a tacit bargain with the new administration in Islamabad: Zardari and Kayani would quietly enable more drone operations while publicly criticizing the U.S. after each strike. The arrangement has worked well for the U.S., though the Pakistanis would like to tweak it. Visiting Washington last month, Zardari asked Obama to let Islamabad have direct control of the drones. (See a diagram of a Reaper here.)

Ordinary Pakistanis, though, remain unconvinced that the campaign serves Pakistan's interests. The drones feature in anti-U.S. and anti-Zardari graffiti and cartoons and are the punch line of popular jokes about American impotence or cowardice: Asked why she's ditching her U.S. boyfriend, a Pakistani woman says, "He shoots his missile from 30,000 ft."

The accusation of cowardice is especially damaging in the tribal areas, where bravery is regarded as an essential quality in an ally. Kilcullen warns that if the U.S. hopes to eventually win over the tribesmen, as it did with Iraqi insurgents, "we can't afford to be seen as people who fight from afar, who don't even dare to put a pilot in our planes." The drones seem to be uniting militant groups against the U.S. and the Zardari government. Waziristan warlord Maulvi Nazir signed a nonaggression pact with the Pakistani military in 2007 and sent his fighters to battle Mehsud. But because he continued to mount attacks on U.S. forces in Afghanistan, he became the target of drone strikes. Enraged, he recently buried the hatchet with Mehsud and joined forces with him and a third warlord in a united front against the U.S., Zardari and Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Mehsud has stepped up his campaign of terrorism on Pakistani soil as well, saying a recent attack on a police-training center in Lahore was a response to the drone attacks.

For all the caveats, the hum of the machay will grow louder in Pakistani skies this summer. The arrival of more U.S. troops in Afghanistan will make it all the more important to deprive al-Qaeda and the Taliban of their safe haven in Pakistan. Obama is widely expected to authorize a broadening of the drone attack to include the southwestern Pakistani province of Baluchistan and its capital, Quetta, where the Taliban high command is thought to be hiding.

But in the long term, the Pakistani frontier can be safe only when the tribes are more favorably disposed toward the U.S. and the Pakistani government than toward the militants. The U.S. hopes that can be achieved by supplementing the drones with development aid, much of it earmarked for the tribal areas. But can that money start working its magic before the resentments roused by the drone campaign metastasize into an irreversible jihad? On that question of timing may hinge the success or failure of a modern war fought in an ancient environment.