Bad News Timing of US drone strike questioned by Munter

US Ambassador to Pakistan Cameron Munter. — Photo by AP

ISLAMABAD: The American ambassador to Islamabad phoned Washington with an urgent plea: Stop an imminent CIA drone strike against militants on the Pakistani side of the Afghan border.
He feared the timing of the attack would further damage ties with Islamabad, coming only a day after the government grudgingly freed a CIA contractor held for weeks for killing two Pakistanis.
Ambassador Cameron Munter’s rare request, disclosed to The Associated Press by several US officials, was forwarded to the head of the CIA, who dismissed it.
US officials said Leon Panetta’s decision was driven by anger at Pakistan for imprisoning Raymond Davis for so long and a belief that the militants being targeted were too important to pass up.
The deadly March 17 attack helped send the US-Pakistan relationship into a tailspin from which it has not recovered.
The timing of the strike, and others that followed, outraged Pakistani officials, complicating US efforts to win Pakistani cooperation on the Afghan war and retain support for the drone program.
Newly revealed details of the drone raids were provided by US and Pakistani officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the program.
Among them were attacks that followed an April visit by Pakistan’s spy chief to Washington as well as trips here by Sen. John Kerry and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton after the American raid that killed Osama bin Laden in a Pakistani military town in May.
Seven years into a secret program that has killed scores of al-Qaida and Taliban fighters, there are increasing questions over whether it is worth the diplomatic backlash in Pakistan.
President Barack Obama has dramatically ramped up the program, unleashing more than 200 strikes since he took office compared to fewer than 50 during the Bush administration.
The Pakistani government is widely believed to have supported the program in the past and even allowed the drones to take off from bases inside Pakistan, but that support has waned as relations between the two countries have soured.
The attacks have also strained the relationship between the US State Department and the CIA, where officials argue that killing militants who threaten US interests should take priority over political considerations, said US officials.
That tension was clearly visible between Ambassador Munter and the CIA station chief in Islamabad, who recently left his post because of illness, said a senior Western official in the region.
”When the doors are closed they are shouting at each other, but once the doors are open they are congenial in front of the embassy staff,” said the official.
The hard-charging station chief also clashed with the head of Pakistan’s main intelligence agency, the ISI, over drone strikes, said a Pakistani official.
The CIA does not comment on the drone program. A US official familiar with the issue played down the tension.
”It is very, very rare for the chief of mission to express concern about any particular operation,” the official said, referring to the ambassador. ”When concerns are raised, they’re always given close consideration.”
Munter must sign off on every planned drone attack in Pakistan, although he rarely voices an objection, said a former aide to the ambassador. If Munter disagrees with a planned strike, the CIA director can appeal to him, said two U.S. officials, providing the most detailed description of the process to date.
Clinton can also weigh in, and has done so at least once, one US official said. On March 17, Munter used the embassy’s secure line in an attempt to stop an imminent drone strike.
His concern was that the strike, a day after the release of the CIA contractor Davis, would set back Washington’s already shaky relations with Islamabad, said the former aide and a senior US official.
The Davis case had left bad feelings on both sides. On Jan. 27 in Lahore, Davis shot to death two Pakistanis who he said were trying to rob him, enraging many people in a country where anti-American sentiment is high.
The US insisted Davis had immunity from prosecution, but he was not released until March 16 under a deal that compensated the victims’ families. Pakistan’s security agencies came under intense domestic criticism for freeing him.
Munter’s request went to the State Department and was forwarded to then-CIA director Panetta, now secretary of defense, who insisted on going ahead, said the officials. It is unclear whether Clinton was involved in the decision.
The former aide said the strike reflected the CIA’s anger at the ISI, which it blamed for keeping Davis in prison for seven weeks.
”It was in retaliation for Davis,” the aide said. ”The CIA was angry.” The CIA also believed it was vital to kill the militants targeted in the strike in the Datta Khel area of North Waziristan, said the senior US official.

CIA’s Pakistan chief leaves country

President Barack Obama's administration recently suspended about a third of its $2.7 billion annual defense aid to Pakistan.-AP photo

WASHINGTON: The CIA’s Islamabad station chief, who oversaw the intelligence team that uncovered Osama bin Laden’s hideout, has left Pakistan for medical reasons, a US official said.
The CIA declined to comment on the matter. “The chief of station is a respected, senior officer who had the full faith and confidence of folks back in Washington,” the US official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
“Most people will agree the officer’s role in one of the greatest intelligence victories of all time means this person was pretty darn effective, no matter what the Pakistanis may think.”
ABC News, citing US and Pakistani officials, said the officer who headed one of the Central Intelligence Agency’s most sensitive positions worldwide was not expected to return.
It was the second such departure in seven months from the post, after his predecessor was forced to leave when a Pakistani official admitted his name had been leaked.
Despite the quick turnover at the key office, US officials told ABC that it would not hamper US intelligence efforts in Pakistan.
US and Pakistani officials told ABC they hoped the station chief’s departure would pave the way for smoother ties between the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI intelligence agency, noting the departing officer had an “extremely tense”relationship with his counterparts in the ISI.
“Pakistan has been harassing US personnel working in the country for months,” a US official told ABC. A Pakistani intelligence official, meanwhile, said “there is no trust.”

Top US officials debate drone strikes in Pakistan

The program, which targets Pakistani-based al Qaeda and other militants, has jumped from fewer than 50 in the Bush administration, to more than 200 strikes in Pakistan's ungoverned tribal areas since President Barack Obama took office. Strikes are carried out with tacit Pakistani assent, by drones that fly from Afghanistan. — File Photo

ASPEN: The White House’s top adviser on Afghanistan and Pakistan said Friday that taking out three to five key al Qaeda leaders could amount to a ”knockout punch” against the group.
Speaking at the Aspen Security Forum, retired Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute said now is the time to keep up US counterterrorist actions in Pakistan, even if they upset the Pakistani government.
Lute said killing al Qaeda successor Ayman al-Zawahri and four of his lieutenants in the next six months could ”significantly jeopardize al Qaeda’s capacity to regenerate.”
His comments came in response to former US intelligence chief Dennis Blair, who said that the US should stop its drone campaign in Pakistan. The CIA’s unmanned aircraft operation aimed at al Qaeda is backfiring by damaging the US-Pakistan relationship, he said.
The program, which targets Pakistani-based al Qaeda and other militants, has jumped from fewer than 50 in the Bush administration, to more than 200 strikes in Pakistan’s ungoverned tribal areas since President Barack Obama took office. Strikes are carried out with tacit Pakistani assent, by drones that fly from Afghanistan.
Publicly, Pakistani officials decry the hits. That tension grew worse after the US unilateral raid into Pakistan on May 2 to kill al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and an earlier incident, in January, when a CIA contractor was held for killing two Pakistani men in Lahore whom he said were trying to rob him.
Pakistan’s ambassador Husain Haqqani acknowledged the drone strikes, but said his government was pushing for a reduction because they’d begun to fray public support.
”Part of the agreement is neither side is going to talk too much about the drone strikes,” he said. ”They’ve taken out many people who needed to be taken out but if the cost is if support for the overall war starts to decline, you have to take that into account.”
Blair suggested that now is the time to give Pakistan more say in what gets hit by drone strikes and when, despite Pakistan’s record of tipping off militants when it gets advance word of US action.
”We should offer the Pakistanis to put two hands on the trigger,” he said, as well as encourage them to send more troops to the ungoverned areas, to challenge the militants.
Blair said the continuing drone strikes are more of a nuisance than a real threat to al Qaeda, and that only a ground campaign by Pakistan would truly threaten it and other militant organizations. The US had been training forces for that purpose until the program was canceled by Pakistan in retaliation for the raid to kill bin Laden.
Al Qaeda ”can sustain its level of resistance to an air-only campaign,” Blair said. ”I just see us with that strategy walking out on a thinner and thinner ledge and if even we get to the far end of it, we are not going to lower the fundamental threat to the US any lower than we have it now.”
Lute countered: ”This is a period of turbulence in an organization which is our arch enemy. This is a period, therefore, that all military doctrine suggests you need to go for the knockout punch.”
Other conference speakers agreed, including Bush administration veteran Fran Townsend, the former chief counterterrorism adviser in the White House.
”This has been the key tool in degrading the al Qaeda leadership,” Townsend said. Without it, she said, al Qaeda would be a far greater threat to the US Stephen Hadley, former national security adviser to President George W. Bush, said the Pakistani government in the past had assented to the strikes, if they were used against major targets.
”The line they drew was boots on the ground, special (operations) forces in Pakistan,” Hadley said. ”We did a limited cross-border operation and it caused a huge outcry to the point where we said we’re not going to do that anymore” unless it was to get bin Laden or his then-deputy Ayman al-Zawahri, ”knowing you’re going to pay in Pakistan public opinion. And we did” after bin Laden was killed.
Blair, who was forced to resign by the Obama administration, says the White House undermined his authority as director of national intelligence by siding with the CIA, instead of telling it to listen to him.
”They sided enough with the CIA in ways that were public enough that it undercut my position,” he said.