Just four days after the American raid that killed Osama bin Laden — and seized more than 100 discs, drives, and computers from the al-Qaida hideout — the U.S. restarted its drone attacks on Pakistan. Then, mere hours earlier, drones hit Yemen for the first time in nearly nine years. Could this be the first result of intel taken from bin Laden’s thumb drives?
The Pakistani military loudly boasted in a statement that its spy agency ought to get credit for killing bin Laden, right as it warned the U.S. against any future unilateral ops — and, for good measure, that the U.S. military needed to pack up and leave Pakistan. Shortly after the military brass issued that statement, U.S. drones hit a compound and a vehicle in North Waziristan, “killing eight militants,” an anonymous Pakistani security official told AFP. It’s the first drone strike in Pakistan since April 22, according to the New America Foundation.
Drones are anything but a unilateral U.S. operation: the Pakistanis have abetted the strikes for years. But the strikes have become more difficult for the Pakistanis to tolerate, at least publicly, since CIA contractor Raymond Davis walked out of a Lahore jail without facing trial for the killing of two Pakistanis whom he said tried to rob him. And the Pakistani statement yesterday made a big show of proclaiming its airspace protected. The strike makes the Pakistanis look either complicit — and, hence, hypocritical — or incompetent.
Meanwhile, several thousand miles southwest, the drones returned to a different theater of undeclared war after a nine year hiatus. A drone launched a missile on Thursday into Shabwah, which the Long War Journal identifies as “a mountainous province in central Yemen that is a known safe haven for al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula.” The targets were two Saudi brothers believed to be al-Qaida operatives, Musaed Mubarak Aldaghery and Abdullah Mubarak Aldaghery.
The rise of al-Qaida’s Yemen affiliate has prompted months of speculation that armed drones would be on their way back to Yemen. They haven’t haven’t launched a strike there since 2002, when they killed Ali Qaed Sunian al-Harithi, an al-Qaida operative responsible for the 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole, in what was essentially a prologue for the aerial robot war to come.
Yemeni officials have said since the fall that U.S. drones have been active in the skies over Yemen, but only in a surveillance capacity, searching for al-Qaida figures. Before Thursday, cruise missiles were the recent U.S. weapon of choice against al-Qaida in Yemen.
Counterterrorism analysts have assumed that Yemeni tolerance for the U.S. hunt on al-Qaida stalled in the wake of the massive protests against the U.S.-allied government of Ali Abdullah Saleh. Not many Yemen watchers believe that a post-Saleh government would turn down U.S. largesse. But the feeble position of the government creates an opportunity for the terrorists. “The under-governed spaces are getting bigger,” Christopher Boucek of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace tells Danger Room. “There is greater and greater space for al-Qaida and like-minded organizations.”
All that raises the intriguing possibility that the strikes come as the result of intelligence exploited from the raid on bin Laden’s compound. SEALs took multiple computers from the site. Politico reported that bin Laden had two phone numbers sewn into his clothing. And Danger Room pal Eli Lake reports that intelligence officials digging through the intel trove believe bin Laden gave “strategic guidance and direction” to al-Qaida affiliates — including the one in Yemen. One story out Friday holds that bin Laden, who was “in touch regularly with the terror network he created,” wanted to “derail a train on a bridge” in the U.S. during a symbolic date.
CIA officials have yet to respond to inquiries from Danger Room about the connection between the drone strikes and the bin Laden compound intelligence. Chances are they won’t confirm anything. But it’s hard to resist making an educated guess. After al-Qaida’s Yemen branch tried to sneak bombs into the U.S. packed into printers, the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command paired up to create “kill/capture” teams, equipped with drones. And they’re precisely the ones who killed bin Laden and stole his documents.
Photo: U.S. Air Force
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/05/first-drone-strikes-since-bin-laden-raid-hit-pakistan-yemen/
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