ISLAMABAD: While interior minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan has ruled out any Pakistani involvement in the November 1 drone strike that killed Hakimullah Mehsud, the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) strongly believes that the ground intelligence about his presence in the TTP’s secret Shura meeting might have been provided to the Americans by the Pakistani authorities. Describing Hakimullah’s death as a major setback for the Pakistan Taliban, Maulana Azam Tariq, a spokesman for TTP’s South Waziristan chapter, has said their ameer had to die because of the hypocrisy of the Pakistani rulers who were actually betraying the Taliban under the garb of peace talks.
The Taliban are not ready to take seriously Ch Nisar Ali Khan’s anti-US tirade at a press conference in Islamabad wherein he went to the extent of saying that the government would review Pakistan’s love-hate relationship with the US against the backdrop of Hakimullah’s death in a US drone attack. A senior Taliban leader told this correspondent on condition of anonymity that both the drone strikes that targeted Hakimullah’s vehicle and his house in Dande Derpa Khel area of North Waziristan were executed with hundred percent precision which was almost impossible without having precise ground intelligence information.
And the ground intelligence for a drone attack to the CIA is always provided by a Pakistani intelligence operative or a double agent. As Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif urged President Obama during his recent visit to the US to stop the CIA-led drone attacks in the Pakistani tribal belt, the American media was quick to report secret documents which revealed long-time Pakistani collusion with the US drone programme. According to these documents, the two countries had a covert deal on drone operations ever since the first strike in 2004, which targeted Nek Muhammad Wazir in South Waziristan. Although Americans had nothing against Nek Mohammad, the latter had threatened to assassinate the then khaki ruler of Pakistan, General Pervez Musharraf.
The drone attack that killed Nek was basically the first time the CIA was allowed by the Musharraf regime to use drones inside Pakistan’s territorial boundaries. Subsequently, the CIA was allowed to oversee drone hits in the Waziristan region mostly from Shamsi base in Balochistan and partly from a US base in Khost province, Afghanistan. After the US AC-130H Spectre gunship choppers targeted a couple of military check posts in Mohmand Agency [which killed] two dozen Pakistani soldiers on November 26, 2011, Pakistan gave a 15-day deadline to the US to vacate Shamsi base that followed its evacuation by December 11.
Since then, there has been a complete halt to drone hits from the Pakistani territory. Including the covert base in Khost, the US has seven operational military bases in Kandahar, Herat, Parwan, Helmand and Nimroz provinces. But despite the closure of the CIA drone bases in Pakistan and the bilateral tensions between the CIA and the ISI, both the secret agencies continue to exchange intelligence information about their common jehadi targets which are subsequently hit with drones.
Hakimullah’s death is being described by the American media as a signal achievement for the covert CIA programme at a time when the drones themselves have come under criticism from human rights groups and other critics in Pakistan and the US over the issue of civilian casualties. Although the November 1 drone attack did not kill any civilian, the Pakistan government has even summoned the US ambassador to Islamabad to lodge protest over Hakimullah’s killing. On the other hand, however, the media arm of the Pakistan Army - the Inter Services Public Relations - has deemed it fit to remain silent and not to give any reaction on the death of someone who only recently claimed responsibility for the martyrdom of Major General Sanaullah Khan Niazi, the General Officer Commanding (GOC) of Swat.
Approached for comments, the military spokesman refused to comment on the Taliban’s allegation that the Pakistani authorities might have contributed to Hakimullah’s death by sharing intelligence information with their Americans counterparts about his location. However, a military official in Rawalpindi who requested anonymity referred to some foreign media reports about the likelihood of Hakimullah’s former No. 2 commander Latifullah Mehsud having supplied the crucial information to the Americans [after his arrest in Afghanistan last month] about the whereabouts of his boss.
The khaki official said the Americans desperately wanted to hunt down Hakimullah for his involvement in the killing of seven senior CIA officials in the Khost area of Afghanistan. But it was hard for them to track him down because he seldom spent more than six hours in any one spot, shuttling between one house and another.
However, having accepted the Sharif government’s offer of a peace dialogue, the TTP ameer apparently committed a blunder by travelling to his headquarter in Dande Derpa Khel area of North Waziristan where he attended a meeting for several hours. Everyone in the area knew at that time, especially the Pakistani intelligence operatives, that the most wanted TTP ameer was presiding over the Shura meeting.
By the time Hakimullah left his headquarters and reached his newly built house in the area, the Americans had already been tipped off about his precise location and he was under their radar, ready to be hit by an MQ-1B Predator which is designed to carry out the “kill chain (find, fix, track, target, execute, and assess) against high value, fleeting, and time-sensitive targets.” As the high value CIA target was stepping out of his car, a US predator fired the first missile targeting the TTP ameer, followed by another missile which targeted his house and razed it to the ground instantly. Hakimullah Mehsud was killed on the spot.
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