Drone strike kills 16 in Pakistan’s tribal areas

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A U.S. drone missile attack that may have been aimed at Pakistan’s
most wanted militant killed 16 people in the country’s troubled tribal
areas Thursday, the latest in a dramatic step-up of such strikes since
a Dec. 30 bombing killed seven CIA workers.

In the last two weeks, U.S. drones have carried out
at least eight missile strikes in the country’s largely ungoverned
tribal region along the Afghan border. A video released last week
linked the Pakistani Taliban to the suicide bomb attack at a U.S.
compound in eastern Afghanistan where the CIA workers were based.

Thursday’s early-morning drone strike targeted a
suspected militant compound and nearby seminary in the village of
Shaktoi along the border of North and South Waziristan, both regions
regarded as strongholds for the Taliban and al-Qaida.

Tariq Hayat Khan, a top official with the Federally
Administered Tribal Areas, where North and South Waziristan are
located, confirmed the strike and said there were initial reports that
senior Taliban commanders may have been among the dead.

Pakistani media reported that Pakistani Taliban
leader Hakimullah Mahsud was the target of the attack and may have been
among the dead. However, Pakistani Taliban spokesman Azam Tariq dismissed reports of Mahsud’s death as “totally baseless. We are safe.”

Mahsud is one of the most sought-after targets by
both the Pakistani and U.S. military. The 28-year-old insurgent leader
took over leadership of the Pakistani Taliban after his predecessor,
Baitullah Mahsud, was killed in a U.S. drone strike last August. Since
then, he has been responsible for masterminding a wave of suicide
bombings and commando-style raids across Pakistan, particularly in northwest Pakistani cities and towns that skirt the tribal areas.

The use of pilotless, missile-armed drones has become Washington’s primary means of attacking al-Qaida leaders as well as Taliban militants who use Pakistan’s tribal areas as sanctuary in between forays into Afghanistan to attack U.S. and Western troops.

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari’s government
has made it clear it will not allow any U.S. ground forces to launch
attacks against militants on Pakistani soil. At the same time, Islamabad has tacitly allowed the U.S. drone campaign against militants to continue, while publicly condemning the attacks.

Since President Barack Obama has
taken office, reliance on drone strikes against militants in the tribal
areas has soared. In 2009, U.S. forces carried out 51 drone strikes in
northwest Pakistan, compared to 27 in 2008. Drone strikes last year eliminated several top militant leaders, including Mahsud and Tahir Yuldashev, chief of the al-Qaida-allied Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan.

The recent rise in drone attacks has principally
targeted North Waziristan, a tribal region used as a base by militants
with the Haqqani network, an Afghan Taliban group regarded as a driving
force behind many of the attacks on U.S. troops in Afghanistan. North Waziristan also borders the Afghan region where the attack on CIA workers occurred.

U.S. officials also have talked about the prospect
of expanding the range of drone targets to include Taliban leaders
hiding out around the city of Quetta in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province.

The increase in drone strikes along with talk of
drone missions in Baluchistan has stoked a fresh wave of denunciations
from Pakistanis who regard the attacks as violations of their country’s
sovereignty and argue that the strikes kill civilians along with
militants.

Flanked by Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s special envoy for Pakistan and Afghanistan,
Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi told reporters this week that “it
will undermine our relationship if there is an expansion of drones and
if there are (U.S.) operations on the ground.”

A report released this week by the Pak Institute for Peace Studies,
an independent think tank, said that the “vast majority” of the 667
people killed in U.S. drone strikes in 2009 were civilians. Other
Pakistani experts, however, have said that the number of civilian
casualties is not nearly as high as many in Pakistan
claim, and that there is considerable support within the tribal areas
for the drone strikes because of the havoc created there by Taliban
militants.

The Pak Institute’s report also stated that the number of suicide bomb attacks in Pakistan rose by more than one-third last year, from 63 in 2008 to 87 in 2009. Overall, terrorist attacks in Pakistan killed 3,021 civilians in 2009, a figure that eclipsed the tally of 2,412 civilians killed in Afghanistan last year.

(Rodriguez reported from Islamabad and special correspondent Ali reported from Peshawar, Pakistan.)

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