White House Approves Plan for Pakistan Drone Expansion

[sonicboom]

Updated December 03, 2009

White House Approves Plan for Pakistan Drone Expansion

FOXNews.com

The decision to expand the CIA program within Pakistan corresponds with the president’s Tuesday announcement to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan.

The White House has approved an expansion of the CIA’s drone program in Pakistan, the New York Times reported.

The Obama administration reportedly is talking with Pakistan about expanding the program from Waziristan to Baluchistan, a controversial move since it is outside the tribal areas.

Baluchistan is where Afghan Taliban leaders are believed to be hiding.

The decision corresponds with the president’s Tuesday announcement to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan.

U.S. officials told the Times they hope to eliminate any haven for militants in the region by increasing pressure on militants in Pakistan, while using ground forces in the Afghan region.

Meanwhile, lawmakers lashed out at Pakistan Thursday as an unreliable ally in the Afghan war that could spare the U.S. its bruising fight with Al Qaeda if it wanted.

"They don't seem to want a strategic relationship," New Jersey Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez said of the government in Islamabad. "They want the money. They want the equipment. But at the end of the day, they don't want a relationship that costs them too much."

A crucial ally in fighting the Al Qaeda terrorist network, Pakistan is also a major recipient of U.S. aid. President Barack Obama and Congress recently approved a $7.5 billion aid package for economic and social programs in Pakistan in a bid to strengthen the civilian government there.

But many in Congress have grown skeptical that Islamabad is doing all it can to drive out Al Qaeda forces hiding along its mountainous Afghan border.

Obama has not said whether or how the troop buildup would accelerate attacks on the terrorist network hiding in Pakistan.

"It is not clear how an expanded military effort in Afghanistan addresses the problem of Taliban and Al Qaeda safe havens across the border in Pakistan," said Sen. Richard Lugar, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Testifying for the second day on Obama's new war plan, the president's chief military and diplomatic advisers said Pakistan was a critical compoanent of the strategy.

"We have a lot of work to do in trying to convince them that we're not trying to take over their country, that we're not trying to take control of their nuclear weapons, and that we are actually interested in a long-term partnership with them," said Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

FOXNews.com - White House Approves Plan for Pakistan Drone Expansion

 

[Barrett]

Keeping in view the current situation of the Afghan war, I thought the Americans could not possibly do worse then what they are already doing. The expansion of drone attacks in Pakistan will have severe consequences on both the Pakistani Govt and the American war. The local population is already chanting anti-american slogans at the top of their lungs and this policy will only make it violent. The media in Pakistan is very vocal about the drone attacks in Waziristan and now attacks on Baluchistan will only increase the problems for the sitting govt, which is already being cornered from all sides for all the right reasons though.

 

[AZADPAKISTAN2009]

Updated December 03, 2009

White House Approves Plan for Pakistan Drone Expansion

FOXNews.com

The decision to expand the CIA program within Pakistan corresponds with the president’s Tuesday announcement to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan.

The White House has approved an expansion of the CIA’s drone program in Pakistan, the New York Times reported.

The Obama administration reportedly is talking with Pakistan about expanding the program from Waziristan to Baluchistan, a controversial move since it is outside the tribal areas.

Baluchistan is where Afghan Taliban leaders are believed to be hiding.

The decision corresponds with the president’s Tuesday announcement to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan.

U.S. officials told the Times they hope to eliminate any haven for militants in the region by increasing pressure on militants in Pakistan, while using ground forces in the Afghan region.

Meanwhile, lawmakers lashed out at Pakistan Thursday as an unreliable ally in the Afghan war that could spare the U.S. its bruising fight with Al Qaeda if it wanted.

"They don't seem to want a strategic relationship," New Jersey Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez said of the government in Islamabad. "They want the money. They want the equipment. But at the end of the day, they don't want a relationship that costs them too much."

A crucial ally in fighting the Al Qaeda terrorist network, Pakistan is also a major recipient of U.S. aid. President Barack Obama and Congress recently approved a $7.5 billion aid package for economic and social programs in Pakistan in a bid to strengthen the civilian government there.

But many in Congress have grown skeptical that Islamabad is doing all it can to drive out Al Qaeda forces hiding along its mountainous Afghan border.

Obama has not said whether or how the troop buildup would accelerate attacks on the terrorist network hiding in Pakistan.

"It is not clear how an expanded military effort in Afghanistan addresses the problem of Taliban and Al Qaeda safe havens across the border in Pakistan," said Sen. Richard Lugar, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Testifying for the second day on Obama's new war plan, the president's chief military and diplomatic advisers said Pakistan was a critical compoanent of the strategy.

"We have a lot of work to do in trying to convince them that we're not trying to take over their country, that we're not trying to take control of their nuclear weapons, and that we are actually interested in a long-term partnership with them," said Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

FOXNews.com - White House Approves Plan for Pakistan Drone Expansion

Send us 1 Air craft carrier and we will hand you George W Bush oh wait did I just said that out loud ... oh yes I did ... oh yes I did ....

Keep sending equipment and don't ask nothing we already sent the whole damn 100,000 k soliders to east what else you want ?

 

[Balance]

Is there no role for GOP to play in the decision?

 

[Mercenary]

Keeping in view the current situation of the Afghan war, I thought the Americans could not possibly do worse then what they are already doing. The expansion of drone attacks in Pakistan will have severe consequences on both the Pakistani Govt and the American war. The local population is already chanting anti-american slogans at the top of their lungs and this policy will only make it violent. The media in Pakistan is very vocal about the drone attacks in Waziristan and now attacks on Baluchistan will only increase the problems for the sitting govt, which is already being cornered from all sides for all the right reasons though.

The Pakistani Media and Pakistani public is as anti-american as it is going to get.

For attacks in Balochistan, I think the US needs to work with the Pakistani Military in coordinating the strikes.

If Pakistan warns the militants of impending strikes, then US can go at it alone.

But initially, they need to work with the Pakistani Army to give them the benefit of the doubt.

 

[H2O3C4Nitrogen]

C.I.A. Authorized to Expand Use of Drones in Pakistan

By SCOTT SHANE
Published: December 3, 2009

WASHINGTON — Two weeks ago in Pakistan, Central Intelligence Agency sharpshooters killed eight people suspected of being militants of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and wounded two others in a compound that was said to be used for terrorist training.
Then, the job in North Waziristan done, the C.I.A. officers could head home from the agency’s Langley, Va., headquarters, facing only the hazards of the area’s famously snarled suburban traffic.

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

The White House has authorized an expansion of the C.I.A.’s drone program in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas, officials said this week, to parallel the president’s decision, announced Tuesday, to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. American officials are talking with Pakistan about the possibility of striking in Baluchistan for the first time — a controversial move since it is outside the tribal areas — because that is where Afghan Taliban leaders are believed to hide.

By increasing covert pressure on Al Qaeda and its allies in Pakistan, while ground forces push back the Taliban’s advances in Afghanistan, American officials hope to eliminate any haven for militants in the region.

One of Washington’s worst-kept secrets, the drone program is quietly hailed by counterterrorism officials as a resounding success, eliminating key terrorists and throwing their operations into disarray. But 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.

Assessments of the drone campaign have relied largely on sketchy reports in the Pakistani press, and some have estimated several hundred civilian casualties. Saying that such numbers are wrong, one government official agreed to speak about the program on the condition of anonymity. About 80 missile attacks from drones in less than two years have killed “more than 400” enemy fighters, the official said, offering a number lower than most estimates but in the same range. 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,” noting that reassessments of strikes in past wars had usually found civilian deaths undercounted. Mr. Parker said his group was uneasy about drone attacks anyway: “Anything that dehumanizes the process makes it easier to pull the trigger.”

Yet with few other tools to use against Al Qaeda, the drone program has enjoyed bipartisan support in Congress and was escalated by the Obama administration in January. More C.I.A. drone attacks have been conducted under President Obama than under President George W. Bush. The political consensus in support of the drone program, its antiseptic, high-tech appeal and its secrecy have obscured just 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 killing in a country where the United States is not officially at war.

In the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, C.I.A. officials were not eager to embrace killing terrorists from afar with video-game controls, said one former intelligence official. “There was also a lot of reluctance at Langley to get into a lethal program like this,” the official said. But officers grew comfortable with the program as they checked off their hit list more than a dozen notorious figures, including Abu Khabab al-Masri, a Qaeda 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 C.I.A. 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, Mr. Singer said. So far, only the United States and Israel have used the planes 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 macho lingo 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 in favor of the attacks and 67 percent against, with a majority ranking the United States as a greater threat to Pakistan than its archrival, India, or the Pakistani Taliban.

Interestingly, residents of the tribal areas where the attacks actually occur, who bitterly resent the militants’ brutal rule, are far less critical of the drones, said Farhat Taj, an anthropologist with the Aryana Institute for Regional Research and Advocacy. A study of 550 professional people living in the tribal areas was conducted late last year by the institute, a Pakistani research group. About half of those interviewed called the drone strikes “accurate,” 6 in 10 said they damaged militant organizations, and almost as many denied they increased anti-Americanism.

Dr. Taj, who lived at the edge of the tribal areas until 2002, said residents would prefer to be protected by the Pakistani Army. “But they feel powerless toward the militants and they see the drones as their liberator,” she said.
In an interview this week with the German magazine Der Spiegel, the Pakistani prime minister, Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani, said the drone strikes “do no good, because they boost anti-American resentment throughout the country.” American 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.

Pakistan’s public criticism of the drone attacks has muddied the legal status of the strikes, which United States officials say are justified as defensive measures against groups that have vowed to attack Americans. Philip Alston, the United Nations’ 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 spokesman for the C.I.A., Paul Gimigliano, defended the program without quite acknowledging its existence. “While the C.I.A. does not comment on reports of Predator operations, the tools we use in the fight against Al Qaeda and its violent allies are exceptionally accurate, precise and effective,” he said. “Press reports suggesting that hundreds of Pakistani civilians have somehow been killed as a result of alleged or supposed U.S. activities are — to state what should be obvious under any circumstances — flat-out false.”

From 2004 to 2007, the C.I.A. carried out only a handful of strikes. But pressure from the Congressional intelligence committees, greater confidence in the technology and reduced resistance from Pakistan led to a sharp increase starting in the summer of 2008.

Former C.I.A. officials say there is a rigorous protocol for identifying militants, using video from the Predators, intercepted cellphone calls and tips from Pakistani intelligence, often originating with militants’ resentful neighbors. Operators at C.I.A. headquarters can use the drones’ video feed to study a militant’s identity and follow fighters to training areas or weapons caches, officials say. Targeters often can see where wives and children are located in a compound or wait until fighters drive away from a house or village before they are hit.

Mr. Mehsud’s wife and parents-in-law were killed with him, but that was an exceptional decision prompted by the rare chance to attack him, the official said.

The New America Foundation, a policy group in Washington, studied press reports and estimated that since 2006 at least 500 militants and 250 civilians had been killed in the drone strikes. A separate count, by The Long War Journal, found 885 militants’ deaths and 94 civilians’.

But the government official insisted on the accuracy of his far lower figure of approximately 20 civilian deaths, noting that the Pakistani press rarely reported local protests about civilian deaths, routine occurrences when bombs in Afghanistan have gone astray.

Daniel S. Markey, who studies South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the comments of two anti-Taliban tribal leaders he spoke with on a recent trip to Pakistan seemed to capture the paradox of the drones.

The tribal leaders told him that the strikes were eliminating dangerous militants while causing few civilian deaths. But they pleaded for a halt to the attacks, saying the strikes stirred up anger toward the United States and the Pakistani Army, and “made them look like puppets,” he said.

“It gave the lie,” Mr. Markey said, “to the argument we’ve made for a long time: that this fight is theirs, too.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/04/world/asia/04drones.html?_r=1&hp

 

[Barrett]

The Pakistani Media and Pakistani public is as anti-american as it is going to get.

For attacks in Balochistan, I think the US needs to work with the Pakistani Military in coordinating the strikes.

If Pakistan warns the militants of impending strikes, then US can go at it alone.

But initially, they need to work with the Pakistani Army to give them the benefit of the doubt.

If the strikes inside Pakistan should come from anywhere it should be from the Pakistani Forces. They are more capable and willing to handle the situation then the Americans, the Swat and Waziristan operations speak for themselves.

We have serious concerns over the training and funding of terrorism in Pakistan being done through Afghanistan so following the same ideology should we conduct air raids inside Afghanistan because the Americans don't seem to be doing enough in the past eight long years.

Americans say that Osama Bin laden is in Pakistan, now unless they provide information how can that be taken seriously? It is just like me saying that mullah omar is in India but unable to give any credible information about the specific location.If you know someone is somewhere you know exactly where, otherwise you are just assuming. It is the Americans who need to do more and not us.

Expanding the theater of drones in Pakistan will only make things worse for us as they plan to pack their bags and leave very conveniently after a year and a half, like always leaving behind an unstable region.

The PA means business and I have serious doubts over the Military leadership sitting quietly this time, unlike the impotent political leadership.

 

[Balance]

Already a thread on this topic. please merge.

 

[Spring Onion]

When the govt will discuss expanding the drone attacks to South Punjab??

 

[Foster]

White House Approves Plan for Pakistan Drone Expansion


Bachara kuch kha bhi nahi sakta

 

[Spring Onion]

White House Approves Plan for Pakistan Drone Expansion


Bachara kuch kha bhi nahi sakta

how come you are still trolling around

 

[H2O3C4Nitrogen]

White House Approves Plan for Pakistan Drone Expansion

FOXNews.com


The decision to expand the CIA program within Pakistan corresponds with the president’s Tuesday announcement to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan.

The White House has approved an expansion of the CIA’s drone program in Pakistan, the New York Times reported.

The Obama administration reportedly is talking with Pakistan about expanding the program from Waziristan to Baluchistan, a controversial move since it is outside the tribal areas.

Baluchistan is where Afghan Taliban leaders are believed to be hiding.

The decision corresponds with the president’s Tuesday announcement to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan.

U.S. officials told the Times they hope to eliminate any haven for militants in the region by increasing pressure on militants in Pakistan, while using ground forces in the Afghan region.

Meanwhile, lawmakers lashed out at Pakistan Thursday as an unreliable ally in the Afghan war that could spare the U.S. its bruising fight with Al Qaeda if it wanted.

"They don't seem to want a strategic relationship," New Jersey Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez said of the government in Islamabad. "They want the money. They want the equipment. But at the end of the day, they don't want a relationship that costs them too much."

A crucial ally in fighting the Al Qaeda terrorist network, Pakistan is also a major recipient of U.S. aid. President Barack Obama and Congress recently approved a $7.5 billion aid package for economic and social programs in Pakistan in a bid to strengthen the civilian government there.

But many in Congress have grown skeptical that Islamabad is doing all it can to drive out Al Qaeda forces hiding along its mountainous Afghan border.

Obama has not said whether or how the troop buildup would accelerate attacks on the terrorist network hiding in Pakistan.

"It is not clear how an expanded military effort in Afghanistan addresses the problem of Taliban and Al Qaeda safe havens across the border in Pakistan," said Sen. Richard Lugar, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Testifying for the second day on Obama's new war plan, the president's chief military and diplomatic advisers said Pakistan was a critical compoanent of the strategy.

"We have a lot of work to do in trying to convince them that we're not trying to take over their country, that we're not trying to take control of their nuclear weapons, and that we are actually interested in a long-term partnership with them," said Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

FOXNews.com - White House Approves Plan for Pakistan Drone Expansion

 

[DaRk WaVe]

C.I.A. Authorized to Expand Use of Drones in Pakistan - NYT



By SCOTT SHANE
Published: December 3, 2009

WASHINGTON — Two weeks ago in Pakistan, Central Intelligence Agency sharpshooters killed eight people suspected of being militants of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and wounded two others in a compound that was said to be used for terrorist training.
Then, the job in North Waziristan done, the C.I.A. officers could head home from the agency’s Langley, Va., headquarters, facing only the hazards of the area’s famously snarled suburban traffic.

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

The White House has authorized an expansion of the C.I.A.’s drone program in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas, officials said this week, to parallel the president’s decision, announced Tuesday, to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. American officials are talking with Pakistan about the possibility of striking in Baluchistan for the first time — a controversial move since it is outside the tribal areas — because that is where Afghan Taliban leaders are believed to hide.


By increasing covert pressure on Al Qaeda and its allies in Pakistan, while ground forces push back the Taliban’s advances in Afghanistan, American officials hope to eliminate any haven for militants in the region.

One of Washington’s worst-kept secrets, the drone program is quietly hailed by counterterrorism officials as a resounding success, eliminating key terrorists and throwing their operations into disarray. But 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.

Assessments of the drone campaign have relied largely on sketchy reports in the Pakistani press, and some have estimated several hundred civilian casualties. Saying that such numbers are wrong, one government official agreed to speak about the program on the condition of anonymity. About 80 missile attacks from drones in less than two years have killed “more than 400” enemy fighters, the official said, offering a number lower than most estimates but in the same range. 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,” noting that reassessments of strikes in past wars had usually found civilian deaths undercounted. Mr. Parker said his group was uneasy about drone attacks anyway: “Anything that dehumanizes the process makes it easier to pull the trigger.”

Yet with few other tools to use against Al Qaeda, the drone program has enjoyed bipartisan support in Congress and was escalated by the Obama administration in January. More C.I.A. drone attacks have been conducted under President Obama than under President George W. Bush. The political consensus in support of the drone program, its antiseptic, high-tech appeal and its secrecy have obscured just 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 killing in a country where the United States is not officially at war.

In the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, C.I.A. officials were not eager to embrace killing terrorists from afar with video-game controls, said one former intelligence official. “There was also a lot of reluctance at Langley to get into a lethal program like this,” the official said. But officers grew comfortable with the program as they checked off their hit list more than a dozen notorious figures, including Abu Khabab al-Masri, a Qaeda 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 C.I.A. 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, Mr. Singer said. So far, only the United States and Israel have used the planes 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 macho lingo 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 in favor of the attacks and 67 percent against, with a majority ranking the United States as a greater threat to Pakistan than its archrival, India, or the Pakistani Taliban.

Interestingly, residents of the tribal areas where the attacks actually occur, who bitterly resent the militants’ brutal rule, are far less critical of the drones, said Farhat Taj, an anthropologist with the Aryana Institute for Regional Research and Advocacy. A study of 550 professional people living in the tribal areas was conducted late last year by the institute, a Pakistani research group. About half of those interviewed called the drone strikes “accurate,” 6 in 10 said they damaged militant organizations, and almost as many denied they increased anti-Americanism.

Dr. Taj, who lived at the edge of the tribal areas until 2002, said residents would prefer to be protected by the Pakistani Army. “But they feel powerless toward the militants and they see the drones as their liberator,” she said.

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

Pakistan’s public criticism of the drone attacks has muddied the legal status of the strikes, which United States officials say are justified as defensive measures against groups that have vowed to attack Americans. Philip Alston, the United Nations’ 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 spokesman for the C.I.A., Paul Gimigliano, defended the program without quite acknowledging its existence. “While the C.I.A. does not comment on reports of Predator operations, the tools we use in the fight against Al Qaeda and its violent allies are exceptionally accurate, precise and effective,” he said. “Press reports suggesting that hundreds of Pakistani civilians have somehow been killed as a result of alleged or supposed U.S. activities are — to state what should be obvious under any circumstances — flat-out false.”

From 2004 to 2007, the C.I.A. carried out only a handful of strikes. But pressure from the Congressional intelligence committees, greater confidence in the technology and reduced resistance from Pakistan led to a sharp increase starting in the summer of 2008.

Former C.I.A. officials say there is a rigorous protocol for identifying militants, using video from the Predators, intercepted cellphone calls and tips from Pakistani intelligence, often originating with militants’ resentful neighbors. Operators at C.I.A. headquarters can use the drones’ video feed to study a militant’s identity and follow fighters to training areas or weapons caches, officials say. Targeters often can see where wives and children are located in a compound or wait until fighters drive away from a house or village before they are hit.

Mr. Mehsud’s wife and parents-in-law were killed with him, but that was an exceptional decision prompted by the rare chance to attack him, the official said.

The New America Foundation, a policy group in Washington, studied press reports and estimated that since 2006 at least 500 militants and 250 civilians had been killed in the drone strikes. A separate count, by The Long War Journal, found 885 militants’ deaths and 94 civilians’.

But the government official insisted on the accuracy of his far lower figure of approximately 20 civilian deaths, noting that the Pakistani press rarely reported local protests about civilian deaths, routine occurrences when bombs in Afghanistan have gone astray.

Daniel S. Markey, who studies South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the comments of two anti-Taliban tribal leaders he spoke with on a recent trip to Pakistan seemed to capture the paradox of the drones.

The tribal leaders told him that the strikes were eliminating dangerous militants while causing few civilian deaths. But they pleaded for a halt to the attacks, saying the strikes stirred up anger toward the United States and the Pakistani Army, and “made them look like puppets,” he said.

“It gave the lie,” Mr. Markey said, “to the argument we’ve made for a long time: that this fight is theirs, too.”'

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/04/world/asia/04drones.html?_r=1&hp

 

[Solomon2]

"Dr. Taj, who lived at the edge of the tribal areas until 2002, said residents would prefer to be protected by the Pakistani Army. “But they feel powerless toward the militants and they see the drones as their liberator,” she said."

I don't get it. Why is the U.S. doing this stuff and not the PA? We don't even have to sell the drones, we could lease the PA the hardware and operators. I doubt I'm the only one to think of such an approach. So is there some resistance in the Pakistani leadership to PA control of drone operations?

 

[ajpirzada]

i wonder when will they target the presedency