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At least three suspected militants have been killed in a US drone attack in north-western Pakistan, officials say. Two missiles fired from the drone hit a car near Miranshah in North Waziristan district, close to the Afghan border. The areas of North and South Waziristan are a major sanctuary for al-Qaeda and Taliban militants. Hundreds of people, many of them civilians, have been killed in drone attacks in the past year. Top Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud was among them. Pakistan has publicly criticized drone attacks, saying they fuel support for the militants. The US military does not routinely confirm drone attacks, but the US armed forces and CIA in Afghanistan are the only forces capable of deploying drones in the region, analysts say. Noah Shachtman of Wired magazine is just back from the region.
- BBC coverage
- Wired.com: U.S. Military Joins CIA’s Drone War in Pakistan
- Tech Podcast: Listen to a longer version of our interview with Noah Shachtman
- Marco Werman talked with Ahmed Rashid about drone attacks (Nov 5)
- Jeb Sharp on the controversial US drone strikes (Jun 18)
Read the Transcript
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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman. This is The World. A US drone aircraft attacked a target inside Pakistan today. Some news organizations are reporting that the attack killed a senior al-Qaeda leader but there’s been no official confirmation or clarification. One report quotes an unnamed US official who would only say the target was not Osama bin Laden or his deputy. It is a graphic reminder of the not-so-secret war being waged from the air by the United States in Pakistan. Noah Shackman of Wired magazine is just back from a close up look at the drone war. So Noah tell us where you were and what you saw.
NOAH SHACKMAN: I was in an undisclosed location in quote-on-quote Southwest Asia. It’s an undisclosed location you can find pretty easily on Google.
WERMAN: Okay so not so secret.
SHACKMAN: Yeah well it’s like semi-secret. And the facility itself was classified and I needed to get an interim secret clearance from the air force in order to get on base. But I can tell you what I saw there which is you know this drone war in Pakistan which has been sort of allegedly credited to the CIA and therefore you know is so secret that it can’t be talked about. In fact the regular US military is actually playing a role in this drone war in Pakistan.
WERMAN: What does this place look like where you were at?
SHACKMAN: The particular facility I’m talking about is a converted medical warehouse. It’s I’m going to guess like maybe 80 feet long. Maybe longer.
WERMAN: Kind of in the middle of nowhere or near any sort of city?
SHACKMAN: No it’s in the middle of this big US base that shows up on Google but you can’t talk about. And it’s surrounded by a bunch of big, high, concrete walls. And you need to get a special pass from a special heavily armed guard within the base in order to walk into this place. And the lights are all turned down low. And at the front of this converted warehouse is a giant screen that has digital maps of both Afghanistan and of Iraq. And marked on those maps are teal dots marking the position of every aircraft, every US and every NATO aircraft, above Afghanistan and Iraq. But there’s a couple of aircraft that aren’t exactly above Afghanistan. In fact they’re a little bit east of Afghanistan, next door in Pakistan. So I had been told for a while that the US military was involved in this drone war but there was sort of visual confirmation of it right there.
WERMAN: Do you have any sense now of how many drones we’re talking about in the airspace over Pakistan? And how does the US kind of manage them all?
SHACKMAN: So the US has exactly 39 orbits or air patrols of drones over what’s called the US central command area, basically the Middle East and Central Asia.
WERMAN: And does that mean 39 actual drones? Or are these 39 kind of clusters of many other drones?
SHACKMAN: It’s 39 clusters. But basically you can figure about 39 are up at any one given time. And that’s the number. Some of those drones are put under the operational control of the CIA for a certain amount of time. But there are 39 orbits and they belong to the US military. The US military also has to keep an eye on where all those drones are. They can’t just let them fly around. Just like you want to have planes fly around LaGuardia Airport or Logan Airport. Right there’s some measure of air traffic control that the US military has to exert. And thirdly, you know when those planes are flying around and are heavily armed and dropping bombs and missiles you can’t just have that happen willy nilly there needs to be some kind of central control or at least some awareness by the US military that that stuff is going on. So it’s yet another way that the US military sort of supervises or looks over all of the drone flights over Pakistan.
WERMAN: Okay so a little difficult to square off boxes and say the CIA’s in charge of this part of the war and the Defense Department is in charge of that part of the war. But from what you saw Noah do the drone attacks on Pakistan fit seamlessly with the operations in Pakistan as kind of a separate conflict to the war in Afghanistan?
SHACKMAN: Well there’s certainly very different rules that apply from Afghanistan to Pakistan. You know in Afghanistan the air strikes have got to be very tightly constrained. You know you really can’t drop a bomb in Afghanistan without layers and layers and layers of approval. And you have to be very careful about civilian casualties. In Pakistan if the media reports are at all correct you know you’re having two, three, four dozen people get killed at a time in these drone attacks and let me tell you they are not all terrorists or militants. There’s got to be some civilians involved when you’re getting that many people killed at once. So there’s a very different feel to the air war in Pakistan. And they don’t seem to be taking the kind of care that they do in Afghanistan.
WERMAN: Noah Shackman of Wired Magazine. Thanks very much for speaking with us.
SHACKMAN: Thanks for having me.
WERMAN: You can hear a longer version of that interview on our weekly technology podcast. To listen or subscribe just go to The World dot org slash technology.
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