WASHINGTON - It seems better sense is beginning to prevail on a key adviser to U.S. Army leadership who just a couple of weeks ago was predicting the collapse of Pakistani state. David Kilcullen, an Australian who served in Iraq as one of the counter-insurgency warrior/theorists to Gen. David Petraeus', the head of American Central Command, now says that that the U.S. drone attacks inside Pakistan's territory were "cowardly" and should be called off as the strikes were creating more enemies than they eliminate.
President Barack Obama has embraced an escalation in the raids that was approved by his predecessor, George W. Bush, last summer. The CIA has carried out at least 16 Predator strikes in Pakistan in the first four months of this year, compared with 36 strikes in all of 2008, according to The Los Angeles Times. The missile strikes have killed about 161 people since Obama's inauguration, it said, citing reports from Pakistan.
During a congressional hearing earlier this week, when a congressman asked Kilcullen what the U.S. government should do in Pakistan, he got an answer that surprised him. Kilcullen said the missile strikes are backfiring and should be stopped.
The LA Times said, "Kilcullen's objection to the U.S. strategy isn't moral (he doesn't mind killing 'bad guys') or legal (most legal scholars consider 'targeted killing' acceptable under the law of war because Al Qaeda and the Taliban are at war with the United States). Kilcullen's objection is practical. He says the strikes are creating more enemies than they eliminate".
http://www.nation.com.pk/pakistan-news-newspaper-daily-english-online/International/04-May-2009/US-drone-attacks-in-Pakistan-backfiring-Congress-told/
 Doyle McManus:
U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan 'backfiring,' Congress told
Predator missile strikes aimed at Al Qaeda often go astray, enraging the people and threatening the Islamabad government, top military advisor testifies. Doyle McManus
May 3, 2009 David Kilcullen is no soft-headed peacenik.
He's a beefy, 41-year-old former Australian army officer who served in Iraq as a top advisor to U.S. Army Gen. David H. Petraeus. He's one of the counter-insurgency warrior/theorists who designed Petraeus' successful "surge" of troops into the streets of Baghdad.
But a few days ago, when a congressman asked Kilcullen what the U.S. government should do in Pakistan, the Australian guerrilla fighter sounded like an antiwar protester.
"We need to call off the drones," Kilcullen said.
In the arid valleys of western Pakistan, the United States is fighting a strange, long-distance war against Al Qaeda, the Taliban and their Pakistani allies. Unmanned "drone" airplanes take off from secret runways, seek out suspected terrorists and, with CIA employees at the remote controls, fire missiles to blow them up.
Officially, this is a covert program, and the CIA won't acknowledge that it's going on at all. Unofficially, intelligence officials say the Predator strikes are the most effective weapon they have against Al Qaeda.
President Obama has embraced an escalation in the raids that was approved by his predecessor, George W. Bush, last summer. The CIA has carried out at least 16 Predator strikes in Pakistan in the first four months of this year, compared with 36 strikes in all of 2008. The missile strikes have killed about 161 people since Obama's inauguration, according to news reports from Pakistan; there's no way of knowing how many of those were civilians.
Only one problem: Kilcullen says the missile strikes are backfiring.
Kilcullen's objection to the U.S. strategy isn't moral (he doesn't mind killing "bad guys") or legal (most legal scholars consider "targeted killing" acceptable under the law of war because Al Qaeda and the Taliban are at war with the United States). Kilcullen's objection is practical. He says the strikes are creating more enemies than they eliminate.
"I realize that they do damage to the Al Qaeda leadership," he told the House Armed Services Committee. But that, he said, was not enough to justify the program. "Since 2006, we've killed 14 senior Al Qaeda leaders using drone strikes; in the same time period, we've killed 700 Pakistani civilians in the same area. The drone strikes are highly unpopular. They are deeply aggravating to the population. And they've given rise to a feeling of anger that coalesces the population around the extremists and leads to spikes of extremism. ... The current path that we are on is leading us to loss of Pakistani government control over its own population."
Another problem, Kilcullen says, is that "using robots from the air ... looks both cowardly and weak."
In the Pashtun tribal culture of honor and revenge, face-to-face combat is seen as brave; shooting people with missiles from 20,000 feet is not. And besides, Kilcullen says, "There are other ways to do it."
Kilcullen didn't elaborate on those "other ways," but intelligence experts say they could include deploying covert teams of hit men on the ground (risky) and training Pakistani special operations units to do the job (time-consuming).
There's no sign yet that the Obama administration is taking his advice. The CIA, like any organization, is glad to take credit for a well-run operation that's fulfilling its mission: eliminating Al Qaeda leaders. Some even claim that the missile strikes have pushed Al Qaeda to the brink of extinction.
"Al Qaeda is on the ropes," the Bush administration's last terrorism czar, Juan Carlos Zarate, told me recently. "We are at the point where we can imagine an end to Al Qaeda as we know it."
There's an echo here of the debate over another CIA program, the "enhanced interrogation" of terrorist detainees. The agency declared the interrogations a success because they produced useful information. But that narrow accounting ignored the damage to other U.S. interests, such as diplomacy and the rule of law.
One legal scholar, Kenneth Anderson of American University, says there's another connection between the two issues: The controversy over how to detain, interrogate and try suspected terrorists has made it simpler just to shoot them. "The most powerful institutional incentive today is to kill rather than capture them," he wrote recently. From a legal perspective, he suggested, warfare is easier than "lawfare."
The problem in western Pakistan is that two U.S. interests are in conflict. We want to kill the leaders of Al Qaeda, but we also want to strengthen the government of Pakistan, which is under serious pressure from Islamist insurgents. At the moment, as Kilcullen points out, we are doing the first at the expense of the second.
The drone strikes play into the hands of insurgents, who cite them to stir up anti-Western and anti-government sentiment. And, according to some reports, the missile strikes have driven Al Qaeda and Taliban forces deeper into Pakistan.
So what happens next? The Obama administration is unlikely to abandon one of the few strategies that has produced results against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Instead, it has requested a new $400-million fund to train and equip counterinsurgency forces in Pakistan's police and Frontier Corps, which are more enthusiastic about this fight than the regular army.
Counterinsurgency is neither sanitary nor bloodless. It may end up a measure of success if we can stop killing people with air-to-ground missiles and go back to killing them the old-fashioned way.
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http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-mcmanus3-2009may03,0,7133284.column
US drone attack claims 80 lives in Pakistan
 AP - Pakistani police officers escort detained aides of Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, center ...
By ROHAN SULLIVAN, Associated Press Writer Rohan Sullivan, Associated Press Writer - Wed Jun 24, 5:02 pm ET
ISLAMABAD - What appeared to be the deadliest U.S. missile attack ever on Pakistani soil brought an unusual reaction Wednesday in a country that has previously denounced such strikes as an affront to its sovereignty - silence.
Tuesday's attack killed 80 people, Pakistani officials said, but missed its chief target, Baitullah Mehsud. He is the country's top Taliban leader and its public enemy No. 1, accused of masterminding numerous brutal operations including the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.
The seemingly accurate targeting appeared to point to cooperation between the U.S. military and Pakistani intelligence - despite Pakistani denials. This was possible because Mehsud - unlike some other U.S. foes in the northwest tribal region on the Afghan border - is so reviled in Pakistan.
Missiles apparently fired by unmanned aircraft first struck a purported Taliban training center in South Waziristan, then another barrage rained down on a funeral procession for some of those who had been killed earlier.
Mehsud attended the funeral in Makeen village, and panicky militants reported losing contact with the Taliban chief for a short time immediately after the attack, according to radio intercepts cited by two Pakistani intelligence officials.
But the officials said they were later able to determine that Mehsud left the funeral shortly before the missiles struck.
The two missile strikes killed at least 80 people, including several senior militants, said the officials, speaking to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to divulge the information. Fifty-five of those killed were at the funeral, they said.
The Taliban gave a slightly lower count: Waliur Rehman, an aide to Mehsud, told the AP that 65 people were killed, including some militants.
It was not known if innocent civilians were among the dead, an issue that has drawn outrage in Pakistan and Afghanistan whenever U.S. missiles have been fired. The region is too dangerous for outsiders to enter, making independent confirmation of the attack's details impossible.
Militant leaders have been targeted in dozens of strikes in the past two years from U.S. drones, high-tech, remote control planes used for both surveillance and to fire Hellfire missiles. The U.S. military never comments on such operations. The highest known death toll in earlier suspected U.S. missile strikes in Pakistan was 30.
Pakistan has loudly disapproved of past drone attacks because they involve the use of force by a foreign government on its soil and sometimes kill innocents.
But the latest strikes went unremarked upon by Pakistani officials for almost 24 hours. When the AP asked for comment, the Foreign Ministry issued a short statement reiterating "Pakistan's consistent position that drone attacks are a violation of Pakistan's sovereignty and must be stopped."
Pakistani officials have said previously that civilian casualties occurred when the U.S. struck suspected targets on the Afghan border without Pakistan's agreement and intelligence.
At least two of those targets - Sirajuddin Haqqani and Maulvi Naseer - are fighting U.S. troops in Afghanistan, but Pakistan has no quarrel with either man.
This time, the apparent U.S. target was Pakistan's most wanted man and the focus of a military operation that is gearing up in his home territory of South Waziristan, part of the lawless tribal zone where Osama bin Laden and other high-value U.S. targets may be hiding.
The offensive comes on the back of the army's operation to oust the Taliban from another northwestern stronghold in the Swat Valley region.
Both campaigns are strongly backed by the Obama administration, which views them as a test of Pakistan's resolve to confront a growing insurgency after years of halfhearted offensives and peace deals with militants.
Many Pakistanis support the operations, fed up with the brutality the Taliban displayed in Swat and with Mehsud's increasingly widespread and bloody campaign of bombings that have killed not just security forces, but also civilians and Islamic clerics who denounced the militant violence as against the tenets of Islam.
Mehsud is also accused of engineering last year's assassination of former Prime Minister Bhutto, whose husband, Asif Ali Zardari, is now president of Pakistan.
The battle in the tribal zone, a mountainous area where the central government holds little sway over heavily armed and religiously conservative clans, will almost certainly be far tougher than in Swat.
Mehsud is believed to have some 12,000 loyal fighters, including hundreds of foreigners. He humbled the Pakistani army in past battles and has been forging fresh alliances with other powerful Taliban leaders and killing off opponents - the most recent one on Tuesday.
"Baitullah Mehsud has crossed a red line, and the Pakistan government and military is declaring open war on him," said Ishtiaq Ahmad, a Pakistan-U.S. specialist at Islamabad's Qaid-i-Azam University.
"What we are seeing now is a relatively promising scenario where there is renewed commitment and closer collaboration between Pakistan's security forces and NATO and U.S. forces in Afghanistan," he said.
That tone could change, however, if the attacks kill leaders less disliked than Mehsud and his cohorts, Ahmad said.
Mahmood Shah, a former security chief in the tribal region, said the government's failure to condemn the missile attacks forcefully could produce a backlash if the U.S. is perceived to be fighting Pakistan's battles.
"Once the impression is established that Americans are assisting in this operation, the indigenous effort will be discredited and anti-American sentiments in the tribal region will overshadow everything," Shah said.
___
Associated Press writers Ishtiaq Mahsud in Dera Ismail Khan and Kathy Gannon and Zarar Khan in Islamabad contributed to this report.
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