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.
2
A History of the Pashtun Tribal Lands of Pakistan
From a historical perspective, this ignorance about the enemy makes the war on terror unique. Rarely have so many resources been deployed on the basis of such a vague understanding about who the enemy is and how it functions.
Afghanistan is a war of attrition, because Pakistan provides a sanctuary for the enemy.
The Pashtuns who live in the autonomous tribal zone targeted by the drones are an Aryan–East Iranian people dominated by the tribal code of Pashtunwali who are often called the Afghans or Pathans. The Afghan-Pashtuns created a state in the mid-1700s that included modern-day Afghanistan and the Pashtun tribal lands of northwestern Pakistan. When the colonial British advanced from India to the borders of their state in the 1800s, the Pashtun hill men began to raid British India. This set off a series of border skirmishes between the expansionist British and the unruly Afghan-Pashtuns that led to the British conquest of a sizable chunk of Pashtun territory, which was ultimately added to their vast Indian empire. The Pashtuns were thus divided between Afghanistan and British India (portions of the latter became Pakistan in 1947).
THE FATA, 1947–1998
The British then carved the Pashtun territory they had annexed into India into two zones known as the FATA and the North-West Frontier Province. The North-West Frontier Province was less hilly and easier to tame than the FATA, and it was often described as “settled.” This area subsequently became a regular province of British India and later the newly independent country of Pakistan. But the Pashtuns in the hills of the FATA were more unsettled, and they revolted against their British masters on many occasions. For this reason they were never fully included in the British state the way the provinces of Sindh, Punjab, Baluchistan, and the North-West Frontier were. A state of perpetual low-level rebellion that often turned into outright war existed in the FATA for most of its history.
In 1947 the newly independent state of Pakistan thus inherited its western borders, defined by the FATA, from the British, and it has kept the system in place to this day. The Pakistani army never entered the FATA, and the government rarely meddled in this autonomous tribal region except to meet with their intermediaries with the tribes, the political agents. The agents ruled the tribesmen through the maliks.
The FATA has thus remained the wildest and most undeveloped part of Pakistan. It was, and still is in many ways, a world unto itself. It has a high poverty rate, low levels of literacy, and few schools and roads, and its population is deeply conservative in religious and tribal terms. Whereas the Sindhis and Punjabis who dominate Pakistan tend to be relaxed Barelvi Sufi Muslims who are strongly influenced by Indian culture and all that it entails (from Bollywood to clothing styles), the Pashtuns of the FATA are much more conservative and have been drawn to the fundamentalist Deobandi branch of Islam.
The FATA might have remained an obscure, Massachusetts-sized conservative backwater of 3 million people had it not been for the December 25, 1979, invasion of neighboring Afghanistan by the Soviet Union. Owing to its strategic location on the Afghan-Pakistani frontier, the FATA quickly became a springboard for cross-border Pashtun jihad against the “godless” Soviet invaders. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, they began to fight with Afghan-based Pashtun mujahideen (holy warrior) rebels who declared a holy war on the Russian unbelievers. Such Afghan-Pashtun mujahideen leaders as the fanatical Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaludin Haqqani used Pakistan’s FATA and neighboring North-West Frontier Province as rear-area staging grounds for carrying out cross-border strikes on the Soviet invaders. Wounded or weary mujahideen trekked over the mountains into Pakistan to regroup and replenish their supplies in the FATA or the North-West Frontier capital of Peshawar. The mujahideen rebels’ weapons caches were safe from the enemy in the FATA, and their guerrillas could evade Soviet offensives by fleeing across the border.