Suspected US drone missile strikes kill 13 in Pakistan’s volatile NW, say intel officials

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Officials: Suspected US drones kill 13 in Pakistan

ISLAMABAD — Suspected U.S. drone missile strikes killed 13 people in Pakistan’s volatile northwest Wednesday, the latest of five such attacks in the past week targeting an area believed to be a hideout for militants involved in a suicide attack on a CIA base in Afghanistan.

The strikes highlight Washington’s growing reliance on unmanned aircraft to control militants staging cross-border attacks on U.S. troops in Afghanistan. The Obama administration has pressed Pakistan to crack down on such groups, but the government has resisted, saying it has its hands full battling local Taliban militants waging war against the state.

U.S. military commanders are especially concerned about the Haqqani network, an Afghan Taliban group with links to al-Qaida which operates from Pakistan’s North Waziristan tribal area. Analysts suspect the group played a role in the Dec. 30 attack that killed seven CIA employees in Khost province, just across the border from North Waziristan.

Since the attack, suspected U.S. drones have carried out an unusually high number of strikes in North Waziristan, part of a larger trend of President Barack Obama using the aircraft more frequently in Pakistan than had his predecessor.

In the first attack Wednesday, a suspected drone fired two missiles at a house in the Datta Khel region of North Waziristan, killing seven people, said two intelligence officials.

A second strike occurred as people were retrieving bodies from the rubble of the house, killing six more, said the officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media.

Four foreigners, including two Arabs, were among the dead; it was unclear whether they were militants or civilians, according to another pair of intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity for the same reason. The identities of the others killed were unknown.

U.S. officials rarely discuss the missile strikes but say they have taken out several top al-Qaida operatives.

Mahmood Shah, a former security chief for Pakistan’s semiautonomous tribal area, said he believes the drone strikes over the past week are retaliation for the suicide attack against the CIA.

The Americans “have concluded that the Haqqani network is causing major problems in eastern Afghanistan, and they seem determined to hit the network, so we should expect more frequent attacks in North Waziristan,” said Shah.

Analysts say it would have been difficult for the suicide attack at the remote CIA base to have been carried out without at least tacit support from the Haqqanis, who control large swaths of Khost province. Any other militants who operate in Khost, including al-Qaida, do so only with the permission or cooperation of the Haqqanis.

The Jordanian man who blew himself up duped agents into granting him entry by leading them to think he would help track down al-Qaida’s No. 2 leader, Ayman al-Zawahri, officials have said.

Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, a 32-year-old doctor, was allowed to enter without being closely searched and then blew himself up during a briefing, killing seven CIA employees and a Jordanian intelligence agent.

The network targeted in the aftermath of the attacks is led by Jalaluddin Haqqani, who was a respected commander and key U.S. and Pakistani ally in resisting the Soviet Union after its 1979 invasion of Afghanistan. Haqqani, believed to be in his 60s or older, is said to be too ill to do much now, and his son Sirajuddin has taken over the network.

Some analysts suspect Pakistan’s reluctance to go after the Haqqanis is driven by its desire to use the group as a future asset to influence Afghanistan and stay ahead of its bigger regional rival, India, after the Americans withdraw.

But Shah, the former tribal security chief, said that even if Pakistan wanted to target the Haqqanis, its ability is limited by the shortage of human intelligence in North Waziristan.

Pakistani intelligence officials have said that at least 30 of their operatives have been killed over the past year in North Waziristan.

Shah said the lack of intelligence hampers the effectiveness of the drone strikes by making it more difficult to choose accurate targets.

“Pakistan’s intelligence ability is almost zero in the border region because of the high rate of killing spies,” said Shah. “In such situations, these attacks are proving counterproductive and producing more militants.”

Pakistan’s government publicly condemns the drone strikes as violations of its sovereignty, but many analysts believe the two countries have a secret deal allowing them.

A drone strike in August killed Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, which have been leading a deadly insurgency against the Pakistani government from their sanctuary in the tribal areas.

The Pakistani army invaded the group’s main stronghold in South Waziristan in mid-October, sparking a wave of retaliatory violence that has killed over 600 people.

Growing violence in Pakistan has not been confined to the country’s volatile northwest.

A suicide bomber struck an army facility in the Pakistan-controlled portion of Kashmir on Wednesday, killing four soldiers and wounding 11 others in an area where such attacks are rare, said the prime minister of the region, Raja Farooq Haider.

Associated Press writers Zarar Khan in Islamabad and Ishtiaq Mahsud in Dera Ismail Khan contributed to this report.