More (#5) from The Way of the Knife:

[Anwar al-Awlaki's son] went to Shabwa province, the region of Yemen where Anwar al-Awlaki was thought to be hiding and where American jets and drones had narrowly missed him the previous May. What Abdulrahman did not know was that his father had already fled Shabwa for al Jawf. He wandered about, having little idea about what to do next. Then, he heard the news about the missile strike that had killed his father, and he called his family back in Sana’a. He told them he was coming home.

He didn’t return to Sana’a immediately. On October 14, two weeks after CIA drones killed his father, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was sitting with friends at an open-air restaurant near Azzan, a town in Shabwa province. From a distance, faint at first, came the familiar buzzing sound. Then, missiles tore through the air and hit the restaurant. Within seconds, nearly a dozen dead bodies were strewn in the dirt. One of them was Abdulrahman al-Awlaki. Hours after the news of his death was reported, the teenager’s Facebook page was turned into a memorial.

American officials have never discussed the operation publicly, but they acknowledge in private that Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was killed by mistake. The teenager had not been on any target list. The intended target of the drone strike was Ibrahim al-Banna, an Egyptian leader of AQAP. American officials had gotten information that al-Banna was eating at the restaurant at the time of the strike, but the intelligence turned out to be wrong. Al-Banna was nowhere near the location of the missile strike. Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Although the strike remains classified, several American officials said that the drones that killed the boy were not, like those that killed his father, operated by the CIA. Instead, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was a victim of the parallel drone program run by the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command, which had continued even after the CIA joined the manhunt in Yemen. The CIA and the Pentagon had converged on the killing grounds of one of the world’s poorest and most desolate countries, running two distinct drone wars. The CIA maintained one target list, and JSOC kept another. Both were in Yemen carrying out nearly the exact same mission. Ten years after Donald Rumsfeld first tried to wrest control of the new war from American spies, the Pentaton and CIA were conducting the same secret missions at the ends of the earth.

And:

The drone strikes remained a secret, at least officially. The Obama administration has gone to court to fend off challenges over the release of documents related to CIA and JSOC drones and the secret legal opinions buttressing the operations. In late September 2012, a panel of three judges sat in front of a wall of green marble in a federal courtroom in Washington and listened to oral arguments in a case brought by the American Civil Liberties Union demanding that the CIA hand over documents about the targeted-killing program. A lawyer representing the CIA refused to acknowledge that the CIA had anything to do with drones, even under cross-examination from skeptical judges who questioned him about public statements by former CIA director Leon Panetta. In one case, Panetta had joked to a group of American troops stationed in Naples, Italy, that, although as secretary of defense he had “a helluva lot more weapons available... than... at CIA,” the “Predators [weren’t] that bad.”

At one point in the court proceeding, an exasperated Judge Merrick Garland pointed out the absurdity of the CIA’s position, in light of the fact that both President Obama and White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan had spoken publicly about drones. “If the CIA is the emperor,” he told the CIA’s lawyer, “you’re asking us to say that the emperor has clothes even when the emperor’s bosses say he doesn’t.”

And:

For all their policy differences during the 2012 presidential campaign, Obama and Governor Mitt Romney found nothing to disagree about when it came to targeted killings, and Romney said that if elected president he would continue the campaign of drone strikes that Obama had escalated. Fearing such a prospect, Obama officials raced during the final weeks before the election to implement clear rules in the event they were no longer holding the levers in the drone wars. The effort to codify the procedures of targeted killings revealed just how much the secret operations remained something of an ad hoc effort. Fundamental questions about who can be killed, where they can be killed, and when they can be killed still had not been answered. The pressure to answer those questions eased on November 6, 2012, when a decisive election ensured that President Obama would remain in office for another four years. The effort to bring clarity to the secret wars flagged.

More (#4) from The Way of the Knife:

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.

And:

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.

And:

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.

And:

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.

And:

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.

And:

... [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.

And:

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 (#3) from The Way of the Knife:

...Pakistani military officers in mid-2006 quietly began discussing a peace deal in North Waziristan, similar to the one already in place in South Waziristan. Keller and his CIA colleagues warned their ISI counterparts that the deal could have disastrous consequences. Their views, though, had little impact. Pakistan’s government brokered a cease-fire agreement in North Waziristan in September 2006. And it came about because of the secret negotiations of a familiar figure to many in Washington, Lt. General Ali Jan Aurakzai, the man President Musharraf had appointed as military commander in the tribal areas after the September 11 attacks and who had long believed that the hunt for al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan was a fool’s errand.

Aurakzai had since retired from the military, and Musharraf had appointed him as the governor of the North-West Frontier Province, which gave him oversight over the tribal areas. Aurakzai believed that appeasing militant groups in the tribal areas was the only way to halt the spread of militancy into the settled areas of Pakistan. And he used his influence with Musharraf to convince the president on the merits of a peace deal in North Waziristan.

But Washington still needed to be convinced. President Musharraf decided to bring Aurakzai on a trip to sell the Bush White House on the cease-fire. Both men sat in the Oval Office and made a case to President Bush about the benefits of a peace deal, and Aurakzai told Bush that the North Waziristan peace agreement should even be replicated in parts of Afghanistan and would allow American troops to withdraw from the country sooner than expected.

Bush administration officials were divided. Some considered Aurakzai a spineless appeaser—the Neville Chamberlain of the tribal areas. But few saw any hope of trying to stop the North Waziristan peace deal. And Bush, whose style of diplomacy was intensely personal, worried even in 2006 about putting too many demands on President Musharraf. Bush still admired Musharraf for his decision in the early days after the September 11 attacks to assist the United States in the hunt for al Qaeda. Even after White House officials set up regular phone calls between Bush and Musharraf designed to apply pressure on the Pakistani leader to keep up military operations in the tribal areas, they usually were disappointed by the outcome: Bush rarely made specific demands on Musharraf during the calls. He would thank Musharraf for his contributions to the war on terrorism and pledge that American financial support to Pakistan would continue.

The prevailing view among the president’s top advisers in late 2006 was that too much American pressure on Musharraf could bring about a nightmarish scenario: a popular uprising against the Pakistan government that could usher in a radical Islamist government. The frustration of doing business with Musharraf was matched only by the fear of life without him. It was a fear that Musharraf himself stoked, warning American officials frequently about his tenuous grip on power and citing his narrow escape from several assassination attempts. The assassination attempts were quite real, but Musharraf’s strategy was also quite effective in maintaining a steady flow of American aid and keeping at bay demands from Washington for democratic reforms.

The North Waziristan peace deal turned out to be a disaster both for Bush and Musharraf. Miranshah was, in effect, taken over by the Haqqani Network as the group consolidated its criminal empire along the eastern edge of the Afghanistan border. As part of the agreement, the Haqqanis and other militant groups pledged to cease attacks in Afghanistan, but in the months after the deal was signed cross-border incursions from the tribal areas into Afghanistan aimed at Western troops rose by 300 percent. During a press conference in the fall of 2006, President Bush declared that al Qaeda was “on the run.” In fact, the opposite was the case. The group had a safe home, and there was no reason to run anywhere.

More (#2) from The Way of the Knife:

[In Iraq] Lt. General Stanley McChrystal’s task force had been handed the mission of attacking the al Qaeda franchise in the country led by Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Wave upon wave of deadly violence was washing over the country, and al-Zarqawi’s al Qaeda in Mesopotamia had claimed responsibility for devastating attacks on American troop convoys and Shi‘ite holy sites. Within months of the beginning of the insurgency, it became clear to commanders on the ground that the war would be sucking American troops into the country for years, and Rumsfeld and his senior intelligence adviser, Stephen Cambone, gave JSOC a long leash to try to neutralize what had become the Iraqi insurgency’s most lethal arm.

The mantra of the task force, based inside an old Iraqi air-force hangar at Balad Air Base, north of Baghdad, was “fight for intelligence.” In the beginning, the white dry-erase boards that McChrystal and his team had set up to diagram the terror group were blank. McChrystal realized that much of the problem came from the poor communication between the various American military commands in Iraq, with few procedures in place to share intelligence with one another. “We began a review of the enemy, and of ourselves,” he would later write. “Neither was easy to understand.” Just how little everyone knew was apparent in 2004, amid reports that Iraqi troops had captured al-Zarqawi near Fallujah. Since nobody knew exactly what the Jordanian terrorist looked like, he was released by accident.

And:

The clandestine missions in Somalia in early 2007 had mixed results. American troops and intelligence aided the Ethiopian offensive through southern Somalia and led to a swift retreat by Islamic Courts Union troops. But the JSOC missions had failed to capture or kill any of the most senior Islamist commanders or members of the al Qaeda cell responsible for the 1998 embassy bombings. And, beyond the narrow manhunt, the larger Ethiopian occupation of Somalia could fairly be called a disaster.

The Bush administration had secretly backed the operation, believing that Ethiopian troops could drive the Islamist Courts Union out of Mogadishu and provide military protection for the UN-backed transitional government. The invasion had achieved that first objective, but the impoverished Ethiopian government had little interest in spending money to keep its troops in Somalia to protect the corrupt transitional government. Within weeks of the end of fighting, senior Ethiopian officials declared that they had met their military objectives and began talking publicly about a withdrawal.

The Ethiopian army had waged a bloody and indiscriminate campaign against its most hated enemy. Using lead-footed urban tactics, Ethiopian troops lobbed artillery shells into crowded marketplaces and dense neighborhoods, killing thousands of civilians. Discipline in the Ethiopian ranks broke down, and soldiers went on rampages of looting and gang rape. One young man interviewed by the nonprofit group Human Rights Watch spoke of witnessing Ethiopians kill his father and then rape his mother and sisters.

More (#1) from The Way of the Knife:

Weeks later, when the September 11 attacks killed nearly three thousand Americans, thorny questions about assassination, covert action, and the proper use of the CIA in hunting America’s enemies were quickly swept aside. Within weeks, the CIA began conducting dozens of drone strikes in Afghanistan.

And:

Lucky for both the American and Pakistani spies, Nek Muhammad wasn’t exactly in deep hiding. He gave regular interviews to the Pashto channels of Western news outlets, bragging about humbling the mighty Pakistani military. These interviews, by satellite phone, made him an easy mark for American eavesdroppers, and by mid-June 2004 the Americans were regularly tracking his movements. On June 18, one day after Nek Muhammad spoke to the BBC and wondered aloud about the strange bird that was following him, a Predator fixed on his position and fired a Hellfire missile at the compound where he had been resting. The blast severed Nek Muhammad’s left leg and left hand, and he died almost instantly. Pakistani journalist Zahid Hussain visited the village days later and saw the mud grave at Shakai that was already becoming a pilgrimage site. A sign on the grave read, HE LIVED AND DIED LIKE A TRUE PASHTUN.

After a discussion between CIA and ISI officials about how to handle news of the strike, they decided that Pakistan would take credit for killing the man who had humiliated its military. One day after Nek Muhammad was killed, a charade began that would go on for years. Major General Shaukat Sultan, Pakistan’s top military spokesman, told Voice of America that “al Qaeda facilitator” Nek Muhammad and four other militants had been killed during a rocket attack by Pakistani troops.

And:

General Kayani was consumed with the past, and he understood that Afghanistan’s bloody history was prologue to America’s war in that country. He had been studying Afghanistan for decades and was an expert in the dynamics that helped Afghan insurgents vanquish a superpower in the 1980s. In 1988, as a young Pakistani army major studying at Fort Leavenworth, in Kansas, Kayani wrote a master’s thesis about the Soviet war in Afghanistan titled “Strengths and Weaknesses of the Afghan Resistance Movement.” By then, the Soviet Union had endured nearly a decade of war in Afghanistan, and Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev had already begun to pull out his troops. Over ninety-eight pages of clear, straightforward prose, Kayani examined how the Afghan Resistance Movement (ARM) had bled the vaunted Soviet army and increased “the price of Soviet presence in Afghanistan.”

Kayani was, in essence, writing the playbook for how Pakistan could hold the strings in Afghanistan during the occupation of a foreign army. Pakistan, he wrote, could use proxy militias to wreak havoc in the country but also to control the groups effectively so that Islamabad could avoid a direct confrontation with the occupying force.

In a country without national identity, Kayani argued, it was necessary for the Afghan resistance to build support in the tribal system and to gradually weaken Afghanistan’s central government. As for Pakistan, Kayani believed that Islamabad likely didn’t want to be on a “collision course” with the Soviet Union, or at least didn’t want the Afghan resistance to set them on that path. Therefore, it was essential for Pakistan’s security to keep the strength of the Afghan resistance “managed.”

By the time he took over the ISI in 2004, Kayani knew that the Afghan war would be decided not by soldiers in mountain redoubts but by politicians in Washington who had an acute sensitivity to America’s limited tolerance for years more of bloody conflict. He knew because he had studied what had happened to the Soviets. In his thesis, he wrote that “the most striking feature of the Soviet military effort at present is the increasing evidence that it may not be designed to secure a purely military solution through a decisive defeat of the ARM.

“This is likely due to the realization that such a military solution is not obtainable short of entailing massive, and perhaps intolerable, personnel losses and economic and political cost.”

In 2004, Kayani’s thesis sat in the library at Fort Leavenworth, amid stacks of other largely ignored research papers written by foreign officers who went to Kansas to study how the United States Army fights its battles. This was a manual for a different kind of battle, a secret guerrilla campaign. Two decades after the young Pakistani military officer wrote it, he was the country’s spymaster, in the perfect position to put it to use.