Just in case you haven't been paying attention to events in central Asia or have not read some of my previous blogs discussing the subject, the conflict in Afghanistan does not just include Afghanstan but Pakistan as well. The reasons for this are the porous and fairly arbitrary border between the two nations that split tribes, limited government control in Pakistan's frontier provinces, and many of the Taliban and Al Qaida leadership having fled to Pakistan in 2004.
The US has responded to this shift in the conflict by increasing military aid to Pakistan, encouraging the Pakistan government to conduct operations in the FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas), and by conducting strikes with drone UAVs...lots of strikes. We have even apparently begun to conduct military raids from Afghanistan into Pakistan, something the Pakistani government does not like.
I'm not sure how I feel about using UAVs to conduct attacks against Taliban and Al Qaida leadership in Pakistan. On one hand, it allows us to be pro-active in targeting the leadership without being forced to rely on an unreliable Pakistan security structure and also keeps the government of Pakistan happy by not having thousands of American troops sitting in their country, something the population of Pakistan would not support...nor the American population for that matter.
However, drone strikes don't always hit what we think they are hitting and there have been numerous incidents in which an attack targeting an Al Qaida leader ending up killing innocent civilians. Good intelligence is often difficult to come by and sources are not always correct.
An example of this was last February when the SF team leader on FOB Cobra came to our S3 and told him that one of their sources was stating several of our high value targets were having a meeting in a village west of the FOB. To make a long story short we went out to the village and found pretty much nothing, other than some teenagers visiting from Samarra. The next few days we pieced together what I think was the story...these teenagers likely came to the village to visit one of the sheikhs who just so happened to have a djinne inside him (a djinne is a genie or fairy); the djinne allowed him to heal people. Word got around that there were strangers visiting the village. This rumor then got to the SF source who assumed "strangers" meant "Al Qaida" and told us that there was a meeting. When pressed for names he gave us a few guys he knew we were after which would ensure we would go out there, which we did. If this was 2006/2007 we would have likely just have confirmed the location of the house and blown it up with an armed Predator UAV, but since this was 2010 and systems were limited we went out there ourselves and found nothing...but potentially saved some innocent lives. Go COIN.
In Pakistan we don't have that ability to confirm/deny reports so if a reliable source tells us a meeting is going on or a high level Al Qaida member is in a certain building we're likely going to blow it up. The average Pakistani does not approve. In fact, more and more Pakistanis are siding less with our campaign to eliminate Al Qaida and becoming more sympathetic with that organization due largely to the view that our attacks primarily kill civilians.
This is problematic because this is an area of Pakistan that is already sympathetic to the Al Qaida cause and leans "anti West". Our attacks may be playing right into the recruiting goals of Al Qaida. If in the future we are allowed to send ground forces into the area, troops will be facing an uphill battle to gain the support of the population in order to more effectively fight Al Qaida and the other organizations in the FATA.
Afghanistan/Pakistan is difficult enough without the CIA drone strikes accidently aiding the enemy. Thanks guys.
In other random thoughts, when looking up the general time for that mission we did based off really crappy intel I found a note to myself in my notebook. It reads: "UNAMI observing election sites that I recommended based off random choice...best WTF/FUBAR moment so far."
This deserves an explaination and I believe a post about the elections in March and our planning for them is due in the near future.
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