Missile 'kills Lashkar-e-Jhangvi leader' in Pakistan

Obituary: Qari Mohammad Zafar

The head of Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi was killed by a US drone air strike in North Waziristan on 24 February, the BBC has learned.

Qari Mohammad Zafar is believed to have led the Sunni Muslim extremist group, which has close links with al-Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban, since 2005.

Mufti Abuzar Khanjari had now replaced Zafar, militants told BBC Urdu.

Zafar was wanted by US and Pakistani authorities over the March 2006 attack on the US consulate in Karachi.

The US had offered a $5m (£3.3m) reward for information leading to his arrest or capture.

Qari Mohammad Zafar is believed to have been living in South Waziristan where he is said to have been closely involved with Qari Husain - allegedly the Taliban's chief trainer of suicide bombers.

Lashkar-e-Jhangvi was banned in 2001 for its role in fanning sectarian violence. It is also linked with the 2002 murder of US reporter, Daniel Pearl and other militant attacks, particularly in the southern city of Karachi.

The BBC's Syed Shoaib Hasan in Islamabad says that analysts believe many attacks claimed by the Taliban in recent years were in fact carried out by Qari Zafar's Lashkar-e-Jhangvi.

The group is believed to be behind the Punjabi Taliban who are blamed for a series of audacious assaults against top Pakistani military targets in 2009.

Defending Against Drones

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How our new favorite weapon in the war on terror could soon be turned against us.

By P. W. Singer | NEWSWEEK

From the magazine issue dated Mar 8, 2010

The unmanned spy plane that Lebanon's Hizbullah sent buzzing over Israeli towns in 2005 was loud and weaponless, and carried only a rudimentary camera. But the surprise flight by a regional terror group still worried U.S. analysts, who saw it as a sign that the unmanned vehicles were falling into the wrong hands.

Today that concern appears to have been well founded. At least 40 other countries—from Belarus and Georgia to India, Pakistan, and Russia—have begun to build, buy, and deploy unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, showcasing their efforts at international weapons expos ranging from the premier Paris Air Show to smaller events in Singapore and Bahrain. In the last six months alone, Iran has begun production on a pair of weapons-ready surveillance drones, while China has debuted the Pterodactyl and Sour Dragon, rivals to America's Predator and Global Hawk. All told, two thirds of worldwide investment in unmanned planes in 2010 will be spent by countries other than the United States.

You wouldn't know it to hear U.S. officials talk. Jim Tuttle, the Department of Homeland Security official responsible for safeguarding America against nonnuclear weapons, downplays the idea that drones could be used against us. "What terrorist is going to have a Predator?" he scoffed at a conference last winter. More recently, The Wall Street Journal reported, the U.S. ignored a dangerous flaw in its UAV technology that allowed Iraqi insurgents to tap into the planes' video feeds using $30 software purchased over the Internet.

Such arrogance is setting us up for a fall. Just as we once failed to imagine terrorists using our own commercial aircraft against us, we are now underestimating the threat posed by this new wave of technology. We must prepare for a world in which foreign robotics rivals our own, and terrorists can deliver deadly explosives not just by suicide bomber but also by unmanned machine.

The ease and affordability of such technology, much of which is already available for purchase commercially, means that drones will inevitably pass into the wrong hands, allowing small groups and even individuals to wield power once limited to the world's great militaries. There is, after all, no such thing as a permanent, first-mover advantage—not in technology, and certainly not in war. The British may have invented the tank during World War I, but the Germans wielded it better in the blitzkrieg more than two decades later.

For now, however, America remains at the forefront of the robotics revolution—superiority that has come at considerable effort and expense. We've channeled billions into UAVs, initiating what has been called the largest shift in military tactics, strategy, and doctrine since the invention of gunpowder. This year the Pentagon will buy more unmanned aircraft than manned, and train more UAV pilots than traditional bomber and fighter pilots combined. As Gen. David Petraeus, head of the U.S. Central Command, put it in January, "We can't get enough drones."

But neither can our adversaries—who don't need their own network of satellites and supercomputers to deploy an unmanned plane. Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson built a version of the military's hand-tossed Raven surveillance drone for $1,000, while an Arizona-based anti-immigrant group instituted its own pilotless surveillance system to monitor the U.S.-Mexico border for just $25,000. Hitler's war machine may have lacked the ability to strike the American mainland during World War II. But half a century later, a 77-year-old blind man from Canada designed an unmanned system that in 2003 hopped the Atlantic from Newfoundland to Ireland.

Today, the lag time between the development of military technology and its widespread dissemination is measured in months, not years. Industrial farmers around the world already use aerial drones to dust their crops with pesticides. And a recent U.S. Air Force study concluded that similar systems are "an ideal platform" for dirty bombs containing radioactive, chemical, or biological weapons—the type of WMDs that terrorists are most likely to obtain. Such technologies have the potential to strengthen the hand not only of Al Qaeda 2.0, but also of homegrown terror cells and disaffected loners like Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. As one robotics expert told me, for less than $50,000 "a few amateurs could shut down Manhattan."

The United States has not truly had to think about its air defenses—at home or abroad—since the Cold War. But it's time it did, because our current crop of weapons isn't well suited to dealing with these new systems. Smaller UAVs' cool, battery-powered engines make them difficult to hit with conventional heat-seeking missiles; Patriot missiles can take out UAVs, but at $3 million apiece such protection comes at a very steep price. Even seemingly unsophisticated drones can have a tactical advantage: Hizbullah's primitive planes flew so slowly that Israeli F-16s stalled out trying to decelerate enough to shoot them down.

To succeed in this revolution, we need something many competitor countries already have: a national robotics strategy. That means graduate scholarships, lab funding, and a Silicon Valley–style corridor for corporate development. Otherwise we are destined to depend on the expertise of others. Already a growing number of American defense and technology firms rely on hardware from China and software from India, a clear security concern.

Equally important, we need a military and homeland-security strategy that considers not only how we use these unmanned systems but how others will use them against us. That means widening the threat scenarios our agencies plan and train for. It also means new legal regimes to determine who should have access to such dangerous technologies—lest our greatest new weapon come back to bite us.

Singer is director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at the Brookings Institution and the author of Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century.

U.S. missile strikes in Pakistan kill Taliban militants

Image by Roger Smith via Flickr

By Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 7, 2010; A08

Back-to-back missile strikes on a training camp in Pakistan's lawless tribal region killed at least 13 militants Wednesday, the latest in a string of apparent U.S. attacks on Taliban targets in the wake of last week's suicide bombing at a CIA base in Afghanistan, U.S. and Pakistani officials said.

Pakistani sources said both missiles were fired by what appeared to be remote-controlled drone aircraft. The CIA has staged more than 50 such strikes in the past year in Pakistan's autonomous tribal belt, long a sanctuary to Taliban militants and, U.S. officials believe, al-Qaeda's top leadership.

Wednesday's attacks brought to five the number of strikes against Taliban targets since Dec. 30, when a suicide bomber killed eight U.S. and allied intelligence operatives at the CIA's Forward Operating Base Chapman in eastern Afghanistan.

The CIA declines to comment on such missile strikes, and U.S. counterterrorism officials cautioned Wednesday against linking the latest attacks to last week's bombing. However, the five strikes within a week were extraordinarily unusual. Moreover, most of the recent attacks -- including Wednesday's in a village called Sanzali -- have occurred across the border from the Afghan province of Khost, home to the Chapman base.

News of the drone attacks came as an al-Qaeda group issued a new claim of responsibility for the bombing of the CIA base. A statement posted on extremist Web sites by Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, head of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, said the attack was intended to avenge the deaths of three al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders, according to a translation of the statement by SITE Intelligence Group. All three named were killed in previous drone strikes. Yazid hailed the penetration of a U.S. intelligence stronghold as a "successful epic."

Some counterterrorism experts have urged American commanders to refrain from an overly aggressive response to the attack on the CIA base. Shuja Nawaz, director of the South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council, said an expansion of drone strikes could stir a backlash in Pakistan.

"Public sentiment in the hinterland is dead set against these strikes in the first place," Nawaz said.

U.S. analysts were exploring possible links between the Haqqani network, a Taliban group closely allied to al-Qaeda, and suicide bomber Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, the Jordanian who attacked the CIA base.

Relatives of Balawi, interviewed Wednesday in Jordan, said he was pressured to become an informant after Jordanian authorities arrested him because of his support for extremist causes.

"He got called in and interrogated," a man who identified himself as Balawi's brother said when reached by phone in Amman, Jordan's capital. "After that, he was under a lot of pressure."

Special correspondent Ranya Kadri in Amman contributed to this report.

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Suicide bomber attacks CIA base in Afghanistan, killing at least 8 Americans

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By Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 31, 2009; A01

A suicide bomber infiltrated a CIA base in eastern Afghanistan on Wednesday, killing at least eight Americans in what is believed to be the deadliest single attack on U.S. intelligence personnel in the eight-year-long war and one of the deadliest in the agency's history, U.S. officials said.

The attack represented an audacious blow to intelligence operatives at the vanguard of U.S. counterterrorism operations in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, killing officials whose job involves plotting strikes against the Taliban, al-Qaeda and other extremist groups that are active on the frontier between the two nations. The facility that was targeted -- Forward Operating Base Chapman -- is in the eastern Afghan province of Khost, which borders North Waziristan, the Pakistani tribal area that is believed to be al-Qaeda's home base.

U.S. sources confirmed that all the dead and injured were civilians and said they believed that most, if not all, were CIA employees or contractors. At least one Afghan civilian also was killed, the sources said.

It is unclear exactly how the assailant managed to gain access to the heavily guarded U.S.-run post, which serves as an operations and surveillance center for the CIA. The bomber struck in what one U.S. official described as the base's fitness center.

In addition to the dead, eight people were wounded, several of them seriously, U.S. government officials said.

While many details remained vague Wednesday, the attack appears to have killed more U.S. intelligence personnel than have died in Afghanistan since the U.S.-led invasion began in late 2001. The CIA has previously acknowledged the deaths of four officers in fighting in Afghanistan in the past eight years.

"It is the nightmare we've been anticipating since we went into Afghanistan and Iraq," said John E. McLaughlin, a former CIA deputy director who now serves on a board that supports children of CIA officers slain on the job. "Our people are often out on the front line, without adequate force protection, and they put their lives quite literally in jeopardy."

The CIA has declined to comment publicly on the attack until relatives of the dead are notified. A former senior agency official said it was the worst single-day casualty toll for the agency since eight CIA officers were killed in the attack on the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in April 1983.

"I know that the American people will appreciate their sacrifice. I pray that the government they serve does the same," said the official, who insisted on anonymity because the agency has not yet publicly acknowledged the deaths.

The CIA has been quietly bolstering its ranks in Afghanistan in recent weeks, mirroring the surge of military troops there. Agency officers coordinated the initial U.S.-led attack against the Taliban in Afghanistan in late 2001, and have since provided hundreds of spies, paramilitary operatives and analysts in the region for roles ranging from counterterrorism to counternarcotics. The agency also operates the remote-control aircraft used in aerial strikes on suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters in the lawless tribal provinces on the Pakistan side of the border. The campaign of strikes in Pakistan has not been officially acknowledged, but it has escalated rapidly in the past two years.

Intelligence experts who have visited U.S. bases in the region say the CIA officers at Chapman would have focused mainly on recruiting local operatives and identifying targets.

"The best intelligence is going to come from the field, and that means working closely with the Afghans," said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert and professor at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service.

The loss of experienced CIA field officers would be particularly damaging to U.S. efforts in the area "because they know the terrain," Hoffman said. "Every American death in a theater of war is tragic, but these might be more consequential given these officers' unique capabilities and attributes."

The bomber and those who aided him must have had very good intelligence to gain access to the secure base without arousing suspicion, he said.

Ninety CIA deaths are memorialized by stars on a wall in the agency's Langley headquarters. The inscription on the memorial reads: "We are the nation's first line of defense. We accomplish what others cannot accomplish and go where others cannot go."

U.S. military officials and diplomats confirmed Wednesday's attack and the eight civilian deaths. "We mourn the loss of life in this attack," State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said.

The number of U.S. military deaths in Afghanistan this year has reached 310, the highest one-year total since the start of the war. Twelve U.S. troops have been killed since Dec. 1.

Khost has been the scene of several major attacks this year. In May, an attack killed 13 civilians and injured 36 others. Seven Afghan civilians were killed and 21 were wounded by an improvised explosive device detonated outside the main gate of Forward Operating Base Salerno on May 13.

Also Wednesday, NATO announced that four Canadian troops and a journalist from Canada were killed in an explosion in Kandahar province, one of the most dangerous areas of southern Afghanistan.

The international coalition said the journalist was traveling with the troops on a patrol near Kandahar city when they were attacked Wednesday.

Kandahar is a hotbed of the insurgency. On Dec. 24, eight people, including a child, were killed when a man driving a horse-drawn cart laden with explosives detonated the cache outside a guesthouse frequented by foreigners. The day before, another Canadian soldier was killed by a homemade bomb in the province.

According to figures compiled by the Associated Press, the latest casualties bring to 32 the number of Canadian forces killed in Afghanistan this year.

Staff writers Karen DeYoung, Michael D. Shear and Perry Bacon Jr. and staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

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U.S., Pakistan Say Apparent Killing of Mehsud Is Huge Setback for Taliban

By Joby Warrick, Joshua Partlow and Haq Nawaz Khan
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, August 8, 2009

Without ever firing a shot at Americans, Baitullah Mehsud had managed to become something of an obsession for the CIA. Over 18 months, the agency tried three times to kill the stout, 5-foot-2-inch commander of the Pakistani Taliban, while spreading word of a $5 million bounty for his death or capture.

The agency apparently succeeded this week, U.S. and Pakistani intelligence officials said, when a missile launched by a CIA-operated unmanned aircraft homed in on the second-floor balcony of a villa in northwestern Pakistan where the reclusive, diabetic Mehsud was getting medical treatment.

The blast is thought to have eliminated a terrorist who was suspected to be behind the assassination of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto and who was at the top of Pakistan's most-wanted list. Although Mehsud had been regarded primarily as a threat to that country, he was also a central figure in a network of South Asian and international terrorist groups whose operations had become increasingly coordinated in recent months. That alliance has exhibited an increasing ability -- and interest -- in striking targets in the West, former and current U.S. officials and terrorism experts said Friday.

"We were seeing different threat streams in the region, all coming together," said a former senior intelligence official who helped plan counterterrorism operations. "Most of these groups had become linked under Mehsud."

The apparently successful hit -- U.S. officials acknowledged that conclusive proof may be impossible unless a body is recovered -- was regarded by U.S. and Pakistani analysts as a devastating setback for the coalition of 13 Pakistani Taliban factions Mehsud had commanded. The confederation of tribally based groups was linked to a half-dozen suicide bombings in Pakistan that killed scores of people, including some Americans. . Terrorism experts say his apparent death will almost certainly disrupt Taliban operations inside Pakistan in the short term, while striking at least a symbolic blow against al-Qaeda as well as Taliban groups in Afghanistan.

It could also help ensure Pakistan's backing for continued U.S. efforts to battle al-Qaeda and loosely allied Taliban groups across the border in Afghanistan, sources said.

"When you take out someone who is that well-known, it creates a sense that momentum is on the side of the good guys and against the bad guys," said Paul Pillar, a former CIA counterterrorism official. "In these conflicts, people on the ground are looking to see who's winning and losing, because you want to be on the side of the ones who are coming out ahead."

The missile attack has launched a struggle for succession among the Pakistani Taliban factions, said U.S. and Pakistani officials, as well as Taliban members.

Although any one of a number of Mehsud's deputies could fill the void, his apparent killing is likely to sow fear and suspicion among his followers, making unity elusive, said John McLaughlin, a former CIA deputy director.

"The survivors quarrel about tactics, strategy and future leadership, while worrying that someone 'inside' might have betrayed them," McLaughlin said.

Neither the CIA nor the Obama administration has publicly confirmed the agency's role in the airstrike, but U.S. and Pakistani officials familiar with it said the Taliban commander was killed early Wednesday by a missile launched from one of the CIA's remotely controlled aircraft. More than 360 people have been killed in at least 31 such drone attacks this year. Although Islamabad has complained frequently about U.S. strikes, American and Pakistani officials have cited the string of hits on Taliban leaders and other insurgents, including foreign fighters, as evidence of improved cooperation between the countries' intelligence agencies. Indeed, the news of Mehsud's apparent death was widely welcomed in Pakistan.

"Pakistani and American officials are working closely to deal with a menace they both recognize," Husain Haqqani, Pakistan's ambassador to the United States, said in a telephone interview. "If indeed the reports about Mehsud being killed are fully confirmed, this will be one of many events that bear evidence to the usefulness of Pakistani-U.S. cooperation."

According to Pakistani and American officials, as well as Taliban fighters reached by telephone Friday, Mehsud was staying at a house owned by his father-in-law in Zanghra, a village in the lawless border region of South Waziristan. Mehsud had summoned a local medic for help and was undergoing intravenous treatment for dehydration and stomach problems when the missile tore into the building, the sources said. Mehsud, his second wife and several bodyguards were killed, they said.

Taliban members confirmed Friday that Mehsud had been killed and was buried shortly afterward.

"Baitullah is no more with us," one Taliban fighter said.

A Pakistani intelligence officer based in the nearby town of Makeen said Mehsud's body had been "totally damaged except his head." The atmosphere in the region was described as tense, as security officials braced for a possible backlash from Taliban fighters.

Many Pakistani officials said that Mehsud's successor would be named quickly and that the group's formidable organization would ensure that it remains a potent force. Among the possible contenders were Wali-ur-Rehman Mehsud, a Taliban commander and spokesman for Baitullah Mehsud, and Hakimullah Mehsud, another close aide who has been linked to sectarian attacks on Shiite Muslims as well as NATO supply convoys heading to Afghanistan.

Karim Mehsud, a lawyer in Peshawar who has met Baitullah Mehsud, said he doubted that killing him would fundamentally change the war. "Another Baitullah will emerge," he said. "This is an ideological war, this is not a local problem."

To those who studied his rise and fought with him -- and against him -- Baitullah Mehsud was no ordinary commander. From his base in the mountains of South Waziristan, he amassed a 10,000-strong army that worked closely with al-Qaeda operatives to impose a fundamentalist version of Islamic rule. Members waged a brutal war against troops and civilians who defied them.

While most other Taliban commanders trained their attention on NATO forces in Afghanistan, Mehsud pioneered the war against Pakistan, the country that helped create the Taliban movement in the 1980s.

In part because of the violence perpetrated by Mehsud and his lieutenants, Pakistan shifted its strategy from appeasement and negotiation with Taliban groups to military operations against some of them. In recent months, troops pushed into the Swat Valley to dislodge Taliban fighters, and regular Pakistani and U.S. airstrikes have pounded South Waziristan.

With reports of Mehsud's death, some analysts voiced concern that Pakistan's army may lose interest in pursuing plans to launch a ground offensive in South Waziristan.

Others said there is a danger that Mehsud's successor could draw the army into a deeper conflict by undertaking a major attack inside Pakistan to avenge the commander's apparent death.

"The army may now try to pressure groups in South Waziristan to break with Mehsud's party and reassert their own domination," said Shuja Nawaz, director of the South Asia Center at the Atlantic Institute, a Washington research group. "August will be a very hot month on the frontier."

Partlow reported from Kabul; Khan and special correspondent Shaiq Hussain reported from Islamabad. Staff researcher Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.