Using drones to kill Taliban suspects decried by many

WASHINGTON —

Two weeks ago in Pakistan, CIA sharpshooters killed eight people suspected of being Taliban and al-Qaida militants, and wounded two others in a compound that was said to be used for terrorist training.

The job in North Waziristan done, the CIA officers headed home from the agency's Langley, Va., headquarters, facing only the hazards of the area's famously snarled suburban traffic.

It was the latest strike by the agency's covert program to kill operatives of al-Qaida, the Taliban and their allies using Hellfire missiles fired from Predator aircraft controlled from half a world away.

The Obama administration has authorized an expansion of the CIA's drone program in Pakistan's tribal area, officials said this week, to parallel the president's decision, announced Tuesday, to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan.

By increasing covert pressure on al-Qaida and its allies in Pakistan, while ground forces push back the Taliban's advances in Afghanistan, U.S. officials hope to eliminate any haven for militants in the region.

One of the worst-kept U.S. secrets, the drone program is quietly hailed by counterterrorism officials as a resounding success, eliminating key terrorists and throwing their operations into disarray. Despite close cooperation from Pakistani intelligence, the program has generated public anger in Pakistan, and some counterinsurgency experts wonder whether it does more harm than good.

Sketchy reports

Assessments of the drone campaign have relied largely on sketchy reports in the Pakistani news media, and some have estimated several hundred civilian casualties. Saying such numbers are wrong, one government official agreed to speak about the program on condition of anonymity.

About 80 missile attacks from drones over almost the past two years have killed "more than 400" enemy fighters, the official said, offering a number lower than most estimates. His account of collateral damage, however, was strikingly lower than many unofficial counts: "We believe the number of civilian casualties is just over 20, and those were people who were either at the side of major terrorists or were at facilities used by terrorists."

That claim, which the official said reflected the Predators' ability to loiter over a target feeding video images for hours before and after a strike, is likely to come under scrutiny from human-rights advocates.

Tom Parker, policy director for counterterrorism at Amnesty International, said he found the estimate "unlikely." Parker said his group was uneasy with drone attacks anyway: "Anything that dehumanizes the process makes it easier to pull the trigger."

Yet with few other tools to use against al-Qaida, the drone program has enjoyed bipartisan support in Congress and was escalated by the Obama administration in January. More CIA drone attacks have been conducted during Obama's administration than during that of President George W. Bush.

The political consensus in support of the drone program, its antiseptic, high-technology appeal and its secrecy have obscured how radical it is. For the first time in history, a civilian intelligence agency is using robots to carry out a military mission, selecting people for killings in a country where the United States is not officially at war.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, CIA officials were not eager to embrace killing terrorists from afar with video-game controls, said one former intelligence official. But they grew more comfortable as they checked off their hit list more than a dozen notorious figures, including Abu Khabab al-Masri, an al-Qaida expert on explosives; Rashid Rauf, accused of being the planner of the 2006 trans-Atlantic airliner plot; and Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the Pakistani Taliban.

The drone warfare pioneered by the CIA in Pakistan and the Air Force in Iraq and Afghanistan is the leading edge of a wave of push-button combat that will raise legal, moral and political questions around the world, said P.W. Singer, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and author of the book, "Wired for War."

Forty-four countries have unmanned aircraft for surveillance, Singer said. Only the United States and Israel have used them for strikes, but that number will grow. "We're talking about a technology that's not going away," he said.

There is little doubt that "warheads on foreheads," in the vernacular of intelligence officers, have been disruptive to the militants in Pakistan, removing leaders and fighters, slowing movement and sowing dissension as survivors hunt for spies who may be tipping off the Americans.

Yet the drones are unpopular with many Pakistanis, who see them as a violation of their country's sovereignty, one reason the United States refuses to officially acknowledge the attacks.

A poll by Gallup Pakistan last summer found only 9 percent of Pakistanis favor the attacks and 67 percent against, with a majority ranking the U.S. as a greater threat to Pakistan than its archrival, India, or the Pakistani Taliban.

Interestingly, residents of the tribal area where the drone attacks occur and who bitterly resent the militants' rule, are far less critical, said Farhat Taj, an anthropologist with the Aryana Institute for Regional Research and Advocacy.

A study of 550 professional people living in the tribal area was conducted late last year by the institute. About half of those interviewed called the drone strikes "accurate," six in 10 said they damaged militant organizations, and almost as many denied they increased anti-Americanism.

In an interview this week with the German magazine Der Spiegel, the Pakistani prime minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani, said the drone strikes "do no good, because they boost anti-American resentment throughout the country."

Pakistan proposes targets

U.S. officials say that despite such public comments, Pakistan privately supplies crucial intelligence, proposes targets and allows the Predators to take off from a base in Baluchistan.

Philip Alston, the U.N. special rapporteur for extrajudicial executions and a prominent critic of the program, has said it is impossible to judge whether the program violates international law without knowing whether Pakistan permits the incursions, how targets are selected, and what is done to minimize civilian casualties.

A CIA spokesman, Paul Gimigliano, defended the program without quite acknowledging its existence. "While the CIA does not comment on reports of Predator operations, the tools we use in the fight against al-Qaida and its violent allies are exceptionally accurate, precise and effective," he said.