Five months after Petraeus’s meeting with Saleh, American missiles blew up the car of Jaber al-Shabwani, the deputy governor of Ma’rib province and the man President Saleh had tapped to be a liaison between the Yemeni government and the al Qaeda faction. When al-Shabwani and his bodyguards were killed, they were on the way to meet with AQAP operatives to discuss a truce. But al-Shabwani’s political rivals had told American special-operations troops in the country a different story: that the Yemeni politician was in league with al Qaeda. The Americans had just been used to carry out a high-tech hit to settle a tribal grudge.
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Just months after President Obama took office, the new administration announced a decision to ship forty tons of weapons and ammunition to Somalia’s embattled Transitional Federal Government, the United Nations–backed government that was considered by Somalis to be as corrupt as it was weak. By 2009 the TFG already controlled little territory beyond several square miles inside Mogadishu, and President Obama’s team was in a panic over the possibility that an al Shabaab offensive in the capital might push the government out of central Mogadishu. With an embargo in place prohibiting foreign weapons from flooding into Somalia, the administration had to get the UN’s approval for the arms shipments. The first weapons delivery arrived in June 2009, but Somali government troops didn’t keep them for long. Instead, they sold the weapons that Washington had purchased for them in Mogadishu weapons bazaars. The arms market collapsed, and a new supply of cheap weapons was made available to al Shabaab fighters. By the end of the summer, American-made M16s could be found at the bazaars for just ninety-five dollars, and a more coveted AK-47 could be purchased for just five dollars more.
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Like a desert sandstorm, the popular revolts spreading across the states of North Africa were in the process of burying decades of authoritarian rule. But they had also caught the CIA flat-footed, and White House officials were aware that for all of the billions of dollars that the United States spends each year to collect intelligence and forecast the world’s cataclysmic events, American spy agencies were several steps behind the popular uprisings. “The CIA missed Tunisia. They missed Egypt. They missed Libya. They missed them individually, and they missed them collectively,” said one senior member of the Obama administration. In the frantic weeks after the Arab revolts began, hundreds of intelligence analysts at the CIA and other American spy agencies were reassigned to divine meaning from the turmoil. It was a game of catch-up.
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Vaccination campaigns were considered a good front for spying: DNA information could be collected from the needles used on children and analyzed for leads on the whereabouts of al Qaeda operatives for whom the CIA already had DNA information. In that time, Afridi conducted half a dozen vaccination campaigns around Khyber Agency, and the CIA paid him eight million rupees.
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American officials admit it is somewhat difficult to judge a person’s age from thousands of feet in the air, and in Pakistan’s tribal areas a “military-aged male” could be as young as fifteen or sixteen. Using such broad definitions to determine who was a “combatant” and therefore a legitimate target allowed Obama administration officials to claim that the drone strikes in Pakistan had not killed any civilians. It was something of a trick of logic: In an area of known militant activity, all military-aged males were considered to be enemy fighters. Therefore, anyone who was killed in a drone strike there was categorized as a combatant, unless there was explicit intelligence that posthumously proved him to be innocent.
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… [an] intelligence tip warned that two suspicious fertilizer trucks were navigating the NATO supply routes from Pakistan into Afghanistan. The tip was vague and warned only that the trucks might be used as bombs and driven into Afghanistan for an attack against an American base. U.S. military officials in Afghanistan called General Kayani in Pakistan to alert him, and Kayani promised that the trucks would be stopped before they reached the Afghan border.
But the Pakistanis did not act. The trucks sat in North Waziristan for two months, as operatives from the Haqqani Network turned them into suicide bombs powerful enough to kill hundreds of people. American intelligence about the location of the trucks remained murky, but Admiral Mullen was certain that, given the ISI’s history of contacts with the Haqqanis, Pakistani spies would be able to put a stop to any attack. By September 9, 2011, the trucks were moving toward Afghanistan, and the top American commander in the region, General John Allen, urged General Kayani to stop the trucks during a trip to Islamabad. Kayani told Allen he would “make a phone call” to prevent any imminent assault, an offer that raised eyebrows because it seemed to indicate a particularly close relationship between the Haqqanis and Pakistan’s security apparatus.
Then, on the eve of the tenth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, one of the trucks pulled up next to the outer wall of a U.S. military base in Wardak Province, in eastern Afghanistan. The driver detonated the explosives inside the vehicle and the blast ripped open the wall to the base. The explosion wounded more than seventy American Marines inside the base, and spiraling shrapnel killed an eight-year-old Afghan girl standing half a mile away.
The attack infuriated Mullen and convinced him that General Kayani had no sincere interest in curbing his military’s ties to militant groups like the Haqqanis. Other top American officials had been convinced of this years earlier, but Mullen had believed that Kayani was a different breed of Pakistani general, a man who saw the ISI’s ties to the Taliban, the Haqqani Network, and Lashkar-e-Taiba as nothing more than a suicide pact. But the Wardak bombing was, for Mullen, proof that Pakistan was playing a crooked and deadly game.
Days after the bombing—and immediately after the Haqqani Network launched another brazen attack, this time on the American-embassy compound in Kabul—Admiral Mullen went to Capitol Hill to give his final congressional testimony as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He came to deliver a blunt message, one that State Department officials had been unsuccessful in trying to soften in the hours before he appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Pakistani spies were directing the insurgency inside of Afghanistan, Mullen told the congressional panel, and had blood on their hands from the deaths of American troops and Afghan civilians. “The Haqqani Network,” Mullen said, “acts as a veritable arm of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency.”
Even after a tumultuous decade of American relations with Pakistan, no top American official up to that point had made such a direct accusation in public. The statement carried even more power because it came from Admiral Michael Mullen, whom Pakistani officials considered to be one of their few remaining allies in Washington. The generals in Pakistan were stung by Mullen’s comments, no one more than his old friend General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani.
The relationship was dead; the two men didn’t speak again after Mullen’s testimony. Each man felt he had been betrayed by the other.
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In the midst of the surge of drone attacks, President Obama ordered a reshuffling of his national-security team. The result was something of a grace note at the end of a decade during which the work of soldiers and spies had become largely indistinguishable. Leon Panetta, who as CIA director had made the spy agency more like the military, was taking over the Pentagon. General Petraeus, the four-star general who had signed secret orders in 2009 to expand military spying operations throughout the Middle East, would run the CIA.
In his fourteen months at Langley, before ignominiously resigning over an extramarital affair with his biographer, Petraeus accelerated the trends that Hayden had warned him about. He pushed the White House for money to expand the CIA’s drone fleet, and he told members of Congress that, under his watch, the CIA was carrying out more covert-action operations than at any point in its history. Within weeks of arriving at Langley, Petraeus even ordered an operation that, up to that point, no CIA director had ever done before: the targeted killing of an American citizen [Anwar al-Awlaki].
More (#4) from The Way of the Knife:
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