US disavows recent drone attacks in Pakistan

Islamabad: When news of the two latest drone strikes emerged from Pakistan’s tribal belt in early February, it seemed to be business as usual by the CIA.

Local and international media reports, citing unnamed Pakistani officials, carried typical details: swarms of American drones had swooped into remote areas, killing a total of up to nine people, including two senior commanders of Al Qaida.

In Islamabad, Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry lodged an official protest with the US Embassy.

Yet there was one problem, according to three US officials with knowledge of the programme: The United States did not carry out those attacks.

“They were not ours,” said one of the officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the drone programme’s secrecy. “We haven’t had any kinetic activity since January.”

What exactly took place in those remote tribal villages, far from outside scrutiny, is unclear. But the Americans’ best guess is that one, or possibly both, of the strikes were carried out by the Pakistani military and falsely attributed to the CIA to avoid criticism from the Pakistani public.

Pakistan’s military spokesman could not be reached for comment.

If true, it is a striking irony: In the early years of the drone campaign, the Pakistani army falsely claimed responsibility for US drone strikes in an attempt to mask CIA activities on their soil. Now, the Americans suggest, the military may be using the same programme to disguise their own operations.

More broadly, the phantom attacks underscore the long-standing difficulty of gaining reliable information about the US drone programme in the remote and largely inaccessible tribal belt — particularly at a time when the programme is under sharp scrutiny in Washington.

For the past month, John O. Brennan, President Barack Obama’s counterterrorism adviser and nominee to lead the CIA, has been dogged by congressional questions about the drone programme’s lack of transparency, particularly when it comes to killing US citizens abroad.

The biggest obstacle to confirming details of the strikes is their location: The strikes usually hit remote, hostile and virtually closed-off areas. Foreign reporters are barred from the tribal belt, and the handful of local journalists who operate there find themselves vulnerable to pressure from both the military and the Taliban.

That murkiness has often suited the purposes of both the CIA and the Pakistani military. It allows the Americans to conduct drone strikes behind a curtain of secrecy, largely shielded from public oversight and outside scrutiny. For the Pakistanis, it allows them to play both sides: publicly condemning strikes, while quietly supporting others, like the missile attack that killed the Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud in 2009.

Still, the information vacuum also places US officials at a disadvantage when it comes to answering accusations that the drone strikes kill large numbers of innocent civilians alongside bona fide militants. State Department officials have complained that they cannot effectively counter civilian death claims they believe are hugely inflated because the program is classified — a subject of lively debate inside the administration, one official said.

The private controversy over the latest strikes, however, suggested another phenomenon at work: the manipulation of the actual drone reports themselves.

The two strikes, which took place on February 6 in North Waziristan and February 8 in South Waziristan, went unremarked largely because they appeared so run of the mill.

Small Pakistani news agencies and international television networks, including NBC and Al Jazeera, carried common-sounding details: accounts of multiple US drones hovering overhead, estimates of the number of missiles fired, accounts of the rescue effort by local civilians and quotes from Pakistani military officials in the tribal belt or nearby Peshawar.