US drones chasing the Taliban into Pakistan & taking ever greater risks

Reporting for Aljazeera online, Spencer Ackerman writes on the unprecedented CIA’s drone attacks in Waziristan areas of Pakistan (Dec. 17, 2010). Before delving further into his article, I draw information from Wikipedia that helps us to locate Waziristan in Pakistan, its official designation, and why it is important to the CIA and US military forces stationed in Afghanistan.
According to Wikipedia,

“Waziristan (Pashto and Urdu: وزیرستان, "land of the Wazir") is a mountainous region of northwest Pakistan, bordering Afghanistan and covering some 11,585 km² (4,473 sq mi). It is part of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, considered to be outside the country's four provinces.

“Waziristan comprises the area west and southwest of Peshawar between the Tochi River to the north and the Gomal River to the south. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa lies immediately to the east. The region was an independent tribal territory until 1893, remaining outside the British Empire. Tribal raiding into British-ruled territory was a constant problem for the British,[1] eliciting frequent punitive expeditions between 1860 and 1945. The region became part of Pakistan in 1947. [See map from Wikipedia below.]

“For administrative purposes, Waziristan is divided into two "agencies", North Waziristan and South Waziristan, with estimated populations (as of 1998) of 361,246 and 429,841 respectively. The two parts have quite distinct characteristics, though both tribes are subgroups of the Wazir Tribe and speak a common Wazirwola language. They have a reputation as formidable warriors,[2] and are known for their frequent blood feuds.[citation needed]

“The Wazir tribes are divided into sub-tribes governed by male village elders who meet in a tribal jirga. Socially and religiously, Waziristan is an extremely conservative area. Women are carefully guarded, and every household must be headed by a male figure. Tribal cohesiveness is also kept strong by means of the so-called Collective Responsibility Acts in the Frontier Crimes Regulation.

“Taliban presence in the area has been an issue of international concern in the War on Terrorism particularly since the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan.”

Expansion of Drone Warfare

Once focused on South Waziristan, the CIA drone attacks have been expanded to and increasingly concentrated on North Waziristan. Ackerman writes:

“Over the past two days, four Predators or Reapers fired their missiles at suspected militants in North Waziristan, with three of the strikes coming early today.

“They represent a geographic expansion of the drone war. Today’s strikes come in Khyber, an area abutting Afghanistan’s Nangahar province, that’s been notably drone-free. It has become an area for militants fleeing military action in South Waziristan to take succor.”

As drone attacks have been expanded geographically, they have also increased in number. The “drone-strike tally for this year,” Ackerman reports, [is] “up to 113, more than twice last year’s 53 strikes.” But there is more.

“According to a tally kept by the Long War Journal, 58 of those strikes have come since September: There has been a drone attack every 1.8 days since Labor Day. LWJ’s Bill Roggio says the pace of attacks between September and November (there was a brief December respite, now erased) is “unprecedented since the U.S. began the air campaign in Pakistan in 2004.” (By contrast, in 2008, there were just 34 strikes.)

And the majority of the drone attacks in 2010 have “clustered in North Waziristan.”

“Both Roggio and the New America Foundation have found that the overwhelming majority of this year’s strikes have clustered in North Waziristan: at least 99, by Roggio’s count.”

What are drones? The following information is from Wikipedia, “General Atomics MQ-1 Predator.”

“The General Atomics MQ-1 Predator is an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) used primarily by the United States Air Force (USAF) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Initially conceived in the early 1990s for reconnaissance and forward observation roles, the Predator carries cameras and other sensors but has been modified and upgraded to carry and fire two AGM-114 Hellfire missiles or other munitions. The aircraft, in use since 1995, has seen combat over Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bosnia, Serbia, Iraq, and Yemen.

“The USAF describes the Predator as a "Tier II" MALE UAS (medium-altitude, long-endurance UAV system). The UAS consists of four aircraft or "air vehicles" with sensors, a ground control station (GCS), and a primary satellite link communication suite.[3] Powered by a Rotax engine and driven by a propeller, the air vehicle can fly up to 400 nautical miles (740 km) to a target, loiter overhead for 14 hours, then return to its base.

“Following 2001, the RQ-1 Predator drone became the primary UAV used for offensive operations by the USAF and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Afghanistan and the Pakistani tribal areas. It has also been deployed in other locations. Because offensive uses of the Predator are classified, US military officials have reported an appreciation for the intelligence and reconnaissance-gathering abilities of UAVs but declined to discuss their offensive use in public.[4]”

Effects on and responses from Pakistanis to Drone attacks

Ackerman:

“It may take years, but some researcher will travel to Pakistan’s tribal areas and produce a definitive study on what it’s been like to live amidst an aerial bombardment from American pilotless aircraft. When that account inevitably comes out, it’s likely to find that 2010 — and especially the final quarter of 2010 — marked a turning point in how civilians coped with a drone war that turned relentless.”
[….]

“But no one knows whether a backlash is just around the corner. While most Pakistanis remain ignorant of the strikes, those in the tribal areas live literally in their shadow, and register enormous discontent, approving of retaliatory attacks on U.S. forces.

“Reportedly, the CIA’s top officer in Islamabad has fled Pakistan after a man from North Waziristan whose son and brother were killed in a strike filed a lawsuit against the agency.

“There’s no official or universally accepted figure of how many civilians have died as a result of the strikes, but New America pegs it at around 25 percent of all fatalities. Long War Journal’s registry is more generous, claiming that 1,671 militants and 108 civilians have died in the strikes since 2006.”

Are the Drone Attacks Legal?

From Ackerman: “Then there’s the question of whether the strikes are legal. Obama administration claims that the September 2001 congressional Authorization to Use Military Force in retaliation for 9/11 provides all the legal protection necessary for the strikes. Some lawyers and law professors, by contrast, think that the drones’ remote pilots could eventually get hauled before a war-crimes tribunal.

“A United Nations report urged Obama to rein in the drones, restricting them to attacks on the seniormost militants. He did the opposite.

“Don’t expect him to heed that warning in 2011 either. After reading the administration’s war-progress report, The New York Times‘ David Sanger noted that background discussions with administration officials made it clear that next year “the pace will be picked up.” The technology certainly enables it: The Predator is giving way to the Reaper drone, which carries a bigger payload; while weapons manufacturers are lightening the weights of air-launched precision missiles.
[….]

“However targeted the strikes may be, the hundreds of thousands of civilians in North Waziristan and the rest of the tribal areas live with the anxiety of the missiles overhead. How long can the U.S. avoid a reckoning?” [End of quotes from Ackerman.]

For more information on the legality of the CIA drone attacks on Waziristan, see David W. Glazier’s statement before the House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs on April 28, 2010. The Subcommittee hearings addressed the topic “Rise of the Drone II: Examining the Legality of Unmanned Targeting.” Glazier is a Professor of Law at the Loyola Law School, Los Angeles. You can find the full six page testimony at: www.fas.org/irp/2010_hr/042810glazier.pdf - In finishing his statement, Glazier says:

“But some matters, such as the use of CIA personnel to conduct armed attacks clearly fall outside the scope of permissible conduct and ought to be reconsidered, particularly as the United States seeks to prosecute members of its adversaries for generally similar conduct.”

Drone attacks may generate instability in Pakistan and backlash against the US.

Anatol Lieven offers his assessment of the implications in a long, informative article published in The Nation magazine, January 3, 2011issue. Lieven is “a professor in the war studies department of King’s College London and a senior fellow of the New American Foundation in Washington.” His thought: we are playing with fire. Here are a few of his paragraphs from the article, highlighting various issues on why Pakistan is important in the US-led Afghanistan war/occupation and generally for the stability of the region and globally.

“The top leadership of the Afghan Taliban is based in Pakistani Baluchistan under the protection of Pakistani military intelligence, and Pakistan has prevented the United States from launching drone attacks on them there (in contrast with the intensive campaign against targets in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas to the north). Taliban forces use Pakistani territory for rest and recuperation, with the support of the local Pashtun population. Pakistan also has close ties to the two other Afghan Pashtun Islamist forces allied to the Taliban, the Hizb-e-Islami of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the Haqqani network in the Afghan region of Greater Paktika. All of this gives Pakistan considerable influence over the Afghan Taliban—though it must be stressed that this influence is also limited. Any settlement brokered by Pakistan would have to be one the Taliban could accept without humiliation.

“But if Pakistan is vital to a settlement, Pakistan is also vital in itself. It cannot be emphasized too strongly that the survival of Pakistan, not Afghanistan, is the most important issue for Western and global security in that region. With six times Afghanistan's population, plus nuclear weapons, a highly trained 500,000-man army and a huge diaspora (especially in Britain), Pakistan would increase the international terrorist threat by orders of magnitude if it collapsed. There is a widespread (though exaggerated) view in the West that the weakness of the Pakistani state and the strength of Islamist support makes the country's collapse a real possibility. Leaving aside the danger (as exposed by WikiLeaks) of nuclear materials and skills reaching terrorist groups, the disintegration of the Pakistani army, with its highly trained engineers and anti-aircraft forces, would vastly increase the "conventional" terrorist threat to India and the West.

“It was therefore with horror that I recently heard that the diminished threat from Al Qaeda means that some Western security officials are suggesting that the West can afford to put much more pressure on Islamabad to attack Taliban strongholds in Pakistan's border region, even though this may lead to greater destabilization within Pakistan. This is lunatic reasoning. The diminished power of Al Qaeda should be cause for the United States and NATO to find ways to withdraw from Afghanistan, not step up the fight against the Taliban—since it was to fight Al Qaeda that we went there in the first place. As for the terrorist threat to the West, this has never come from the Afghan Taliban—but it increasingly comes from the Pakistani Taliban and their allies, as the case of attempted Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad demonstrates.

“Unfortunately, the current US strategy is headed in the opposite direction from using Pakistan to broker a settlement, and toward an intensified fight against the Taliban and intensified pressure on Pakistan. Even worse, there are barely the rudiments of a Plan B if that strategy fails. If it proves impossible to strengthen the Afghan National Army sufficiently within the next two years, the options will be stark: either US forces will have to fight on in Afghanistan indefinitely or they will have to accept the probable loss of the south and east of the country and either unending civil war or de facto partition through bloody war rather than negotiated agreement. Among other things, all these options will be bad for Pakistan, especially if India is drawn into much greater support for the anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan. This would in effect lead to an Indo-Pakistani proxy war in Afghanistan.”
[….]

In his concluding paragraph, Lieven writes:

“Behind all these questions lies once again the issue of Pakistan’s role, Pakistan’s future and the US role in that future. Since our options for coercing Pakistan are so limited – at least, without actions that would risk destroying Pakistan and involving us in far worse disasters – we should try to make the best of an admittedly very difficult situation and seek Pakistan’s help in finding a settlement to the Afghanistan conflict.”

In sum, the US is prosecuting a war/occupation in Afghanistan by expanding it into Pakistan, increasing the use of drones, which are of dubious legality, violating the sovereignty of Pakistan, causing civilian casualties, raising the level of anger and hatred of Pakistanis toward the US, potentially undermining the fragile stability of the Pakistan state, and avoiding real negotiations with the Taliban leaders. As Anatol Lieven notes, “This [or something like this] is lunatic reasoning.”