Having failed to arrest Harethi, the CIA tried tracking him down using a Predator drone based in the French-garrisoned country of Djibouti as part of Combined Joint Task Force–Horn of Africa. The U.S. ambassador in Yemen also paid off some local tribesmen to keep track of Harethi’s movements.11 This two-tracked policy paid dividends on November 4, 2002, when the NSA’s Yemen-based Cryptological Support Group tracked Harethi down by monitoring his cell phone. The NSA told the CIA, “Here’s the general location…. We have the satellite phone, now go get the guy.”12
A patrolling drone was rushed to the scene and spotted Harethi’s vehicle. As Harethi and his compatriots made their way out into the desert, their SUV was suddenly hit with a powerful Hellfire missile that carried enough explosives to destroy a tank. Everyone inside was instantly incinerated. According to one report, all that remained of the travelers was “a mass of carbonized body parts.”13 Harethi’s body was identified by a distinctive mark found on his dismembered leg.
But that was not all. It was later discovered that the CIA had killed two birds with one stone, for one of Harethi’s companions was found to be none other than Kemal Darwish, the head of an al Qaeda sleeper cell based in Lackawana, New York. It so happened that Darwish was a naturalized U.S. citizen, which meant that the CIA had executed an American without providing him with a trial. U.S. government officials later claimed that they had not known in advance that Darwish was in the SUV, but as one official dryly put it, “it would not have made a difference. If you’re a terrorist, you’re a terrorist.”14
The U.S. government’s views on the assassination had clearly come a long way since George Tenet’s cautious approach on the eve of 9/11, and this did not go unnoticed. The killing of an American citizen by the CIA raised eyebrows, as did the killing of a Yemeni citizen on Yemeni soil by a foreign intelligence agency. In many ways the Yemeni reaction to the targeted killing of two terrorists and their compatriots provided a foretaste of the reaction to the Americans’ more systematic campaign of drone assassinations in Pakistan’s remote tribal zones. Although the CIA’s operations to kill Harethi had had the tacit approval of the Yemeni government, the actual drone strike had been carried out unilaterally. Some members of the Yemeni government expressed unease with the way the CIA had acted on their soil and the opposition parties howled in protest about the violation of Yemen’s sovereignty.
The Economist presciently predicted, “The relentless advance of technology means the use of pilotless aircraft to hunt down terrorists will become more appealing to America…. The attack in Yemen will not be their last.”15
Criticisms and fears of an expanded campaign did not, however, faze the Bush administration. President Bush subsequently declared, “The only way to treat them is [as] what they are: international killers…. And the only way to find them is to be patient and steadfast and hunt them down. And the United States of America is doing just that. We’re in it for the long haul.”16 By defending the Yemen strike, the White House was serving notice of America’s bold intention to use the latest technology available to track and kill al Qaeda members wherever they were hiding. One did not have to be versed in geopolitics to sense that that would ultimately take the Americans to Pakistan.
By this time it was clear to all that the main sanctuary that the United States was interested in denying to the terrorists was found in Pakistan’s FATA region. Even as America began its massive invasion of Iraq, which would see U.S. CENTCOM deploy more than 150,000 troops (compared to a mere ten thousand U.S. troops in the larger country of Afghanistan), the CIA persistently kept up the manhunt for the original target of the war on terror, bin Laden.
When bin Laden and his number two, Ayman al Zawahiri, had themselves filmed in 2002 walking together in the mountains of what was presumed to be the FATA, the Americans were reminded of the importance of their unfulfilled mission. The U.S. State Department began to pressure the Pakistanis to do something about the fact that the world’s most wanted terrorist and many of his accomplices were hiding out in territory nominally under their control. The White House wanted the Pakistani army to enter the autonomous tribal agencies and hunt down al Qaeda.
In July 2002 Pakistan responded to U.S. pressure by sending Pakistani troops to the FATA’s Tirah Valley (Kurram Agency) for the first time ever. Their aim was to capture bin Laden, Zawahiri, and other foreign fighters and terrorists said to be hiding there. From Tirah Valley they proceeded into the Shawal Valley of North Waziristan and then into South Waziristan. This incursion into the FATA was made possible after long negotiations with prickly local Pashtun tribes that had always enjoyed their autonomy.
But as the Pakistani troops clumsily shelled compounds and hujras where the foreign terrorists and fighters were holed up, militants among the local Waziri and Mehsud Pashtun tribes rose up against them. The Pakistani army, it seemed, had inadvertently stirred the hornet’s nest. By this time the press began to speak for the first time of the “Pakistani Taliban.” These were ad hoc militias made up of local Pashtun fundamentalist militants, many of whom had gone to fight in Afghanistan on behalf of Mullah Omar’s Taliban regime. They were joined by hundreds of Punjabi militants who had fled to Pakistan’s remote agencies in 2002, when President Musharraf, at the behest of the Americans, banned the Pakistani jihadi groups that had fought in Kashmir.
In the FATA the militants began to organize resistance to the Pakistani army and to exert their own control. They extended their power through killings and intimidation. Any malik suspected of being a moderate, a secularist, or a supporter of the “apostate” Pakistani government was brutally murdered. Hundreds of tribal leaders were hunted down and killed in this assassination campaign, especially in the agencies of Bajaur and North and South Waziristan.17 The Pakistani ISI’s Taliban chickens had finally come home to roost. A typical report from the Pakistani press described this sort of creeping conquest by the informal Pakistani Taliban as follows:
“Talibanisation has taken strong roots in Orakzai and the region is now run by the Taliban council, which has introduced sharia (Islamic) law,” tribesmen who have moved from Orakzai to escape Taliban-style rule told Daily Times on Tuesday….
They said the Taliban council had banned women from travelling outside their homes without the escort of male family members. “There is a ban on music and dancing during wedding ceremonies; working of NGOs; and development works,” they added. Each area now has its own Taliban chief and is patrolled by Taliban militants to keep the local population under the control of the TTP, the residents said.18
Another report by the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) captures the horrors faced by average tribesmen living under the harsh rule of the ever-expanding Taliban: “They [the Pakistani Taliban] were beheading people, they were shooting innocent people without any warning, they were terrifying us…. They were stopping our kids from going to school, they were kidnapping young boys…. With my own hands I have buried 18 people who were beheaded, even children…. They are not friends, they are not our allies, they’re our enemies, they are criminals, they are gangsters.”19