Report: U.S. may target Taliban leadership in Quetta with drone strikes

Consider this an unexpected benefit of The One’s eagerness to get out of Afghanistan. He has every incentive to do as much damage to the enemy as possible as quickly as possible, which may encourage him to make moves even Bush wasn’t daring enough to make. It’s been an open secret, and an international disgrace, for years that the Taliban leadership operates relatively freely in the Pakistani city of Quetta; I’ve written about it before but not until just recently did Pakistan itself admit the obvious. We know they’re in the city. The question is, what are we — and, more importantly, Pakistan — prepared to do about it?

Senior U.S. officials are pushing to expand CIA drone strikes beyond Pakistan’s tribal region and into a major city in an attempt to pressure the Pakistani government to pursue Taliban leaders based in Quetta.

The proposal has opened a contentious new front in the clandestine war. The prospect of Predator aircraft strikes in Quetta, a sprawling city, signals a new U.S. resolve to decapitate the Taliban. But it also risks rupturing Washington’s relationship with Islamabad.

The concern has created tension among Obama administration officials over whether unmanned aircraft strikes in a city of 850,000 are a realistic option. Proponents, including some military leaders, argue that attacking the Taliban in Quetta — or at least threatening to do so — is crucial to the success of the revised war strategy President Obama unveiled last week.

“If we don’t do this — at least have a real discussion of it — Pakistan might not think we are serious,” said a senior U.S. official involved in war planning. “What the Pakistanis have to do is tell the Taliban that there is too much pressure from the U.S.; we can’t allow you to have sanctuary inside Pakistan anymore.”…

Pakistan is working with the CIA to coax certain Taliban lieutenants in Omar’s fold to defect. U.S. officials said contacts have been handled primarily by the Saudi and Pakistani intelligence services. The results of the effort are unclear.

The fear, of course, is that drone strikes in a place as crowded as a city will produce a catastrophic misfire and a similarly catastrophic public backlash. Which is why, I assume, this is mostly a bluff aimed at scaring the Pakistanis into sending people in and taking out the leadership itself. But how likely is that? Via Bill Roggio, a bit of insight into our “friends” in Pakistan’s intel service, the ISI:

Champagne popped open this week as Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) celebrated US President Barack Obama’s announcement that American troops would start withdrawing from Afghanistan in July 2011. Despite the extra 30,000 soldiers and the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) expansion of its unmanned drone operations inside Pakistan’s tribal areas, Islamabad was jubilant. The ISI’s strategy of waiting for the Americans to leave was paying off. Soon, Islamabad would recapture Kabul after eight years of domination by New Delhi…

Clearly, the ISI runs circles around the CIA. The CIA knows it, but can do little except gnash its teeth, because it has no spies among the jihadists. The ISI doesn’t need spies; it created the Taliban.

The Americans ought to demand that the ISI demonstrate sincerity by handing over Mullah Omar, the Taliban chief. The one-eyed Mullah and his cohorts are said to have converted one of Quetta’s suburbs into a kind of mini-Taliban city; it is a place which neither Pakistani police nor journalists dare visit. Houses, shops and mosques have all been purchased by the Taliban (using ISI money, which is basically US military aid; yes, ironic). The ISI is in constant touch with the Taliban hierarchy. And even with expanded CIA drone operations, it will be difficult to get Mullah Omar; the drones have been hitting targets in the countryside and mountains, not in the cities, and even that has swelled anti-American sentiment, according to every Pakistani leader, civilian or military. Imagine what a strike in a crowded urban area would do.

ISI can tell us where they are — and it can also give us bogus information which would cause massive civilian casualties, a resulting PR nightmare, and a very rapid abandonment of the drone-strike strategy in Quetta. Which, I assume, explains why Bush never tried it: It’s likely too hard to get CIA people inside a Taliban citadel so we’re forced to rely on Pakistani intel to hand over their own proxy jihadi army, something they have little incentive to do. In fact, just today there’s a story at the Times about their refusal to crack down on Siraj Haqqani, another creation of ISI who’s been waging war on the U.S. inside Afghanistan from North Waziristan.

The core reason for Pakistan’s imperviousness is its scant faith in the Obama surge, and what Pakistan sees as the need to position itself for a major regional realignment in Afghanistan once American forces begin to leave…

Pakistan is particularly eager to counter the growing influence of its archenemy, India, which is pouring $1.2 billion in aid into Afghanistan. “If American walks away, Pakistan is very worried that it will have India on its eastern border and India on its western border in Afghanistan,” said Tariq Fatemi, a former Pakistani ambassador to the United States who is pro-American in his views.

For that reason, Mr. Fatemi said, the Pakistani Army was “very reluctant” to jettison Mr. Haqqani, Pakistan’s strong card in Afghanistan. Moreover, the Pakistanis do not want to alienate Mr. Haqqani because they consider him an important player in reconciliation efforts that they would like to see get under way in Afghanistan immediately, the officials said.

It’s a Catch-22: Obama’s eagerness to leave is aimed in part at pressuring Pakistan to help us succeed and get out, but Pakistan has less incentive to help us succeed and get out if it thinks we’re eager to leave. Which brings us back to the main question of how the U.S. can even credibly threaten to hit high-value targets in Quetta without ISI help and, indeed, with the ISI actively trying to thwart them. Presumably there have been defections to our side from inside the city giving us an intelligence presence there, or else there’s some sort of leverage we have over ISI which you and I don’t know about that would cause them to start ratting out big fish like Mullah Omar. Keep an eye out in your news-reading travails for reports of Taliban capos suddenly being arrested. It has, after all, happened before.

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