As Drones Decline Will Covert Strikes Inside Pakistan Rise?
02 June 2009 4:00 pm by Taylor Marsh
The advent of “spy chips” adds an interesting nugget to Karen DeYoung’s piece reporting Al Qaeda “shaken” in Pakistan.
Drone-launched U.S. missile attacks and Pakistan’s ongoing military offensive in and around the Swat Valley have unsettled al-Qaeda and undermined its relative invulnerability in Pakistani mountain sanctuaries, U.S. military and intelligence officials say. …
As Danger Room points out, there’s more to this than just the drones. Not surprisingly, we’ve got spies.
Word of these tiny transmitters has been circulating in militant circles for months. In early April, the Pakistani Taliban leader Mullah Nazir said he had caught “spies” who were inserting into militants’ phones “location-tracking SIMs” — Subscriber Identity Module cards, used to identify mobile devices on a cellular network.
Ten days later, 19 year-old Habibur Rehman made a videotaped “confession” of planting such devices, just before he was executed by the Taliban as an American spy. “I was given $122 to drop chips wrapped in cigarette paper at Al Qaeda and Taliban houses,” he said. If I was successful, I was told, I would be given thousands of dollars.”
But Rehman says he didn’t just tag jihadists with the devices. “The money was good so I started throwing the chips all over. …
Recently, Kilkullen and Exum weighed in against drones, foreshadowing that drone policy is about to shift.
Because this subject coincides with McCrystal’s confirmation hearing today, here’s Tom Ricks:
I think this is of a piece with replacing Gen. David McKiernan with Gen. Stanley McChrystal. If you can’t do drone strikes, you are occasionally gonna need to whack people with covert strikes of another sort. Manned raids, as it were. And who knows those better than Stan?
As far back as 2008, SecDef Gates has been blunt that further counterinsurgency inside Pakistan is an option. This year once again reiterating that Pakistan is a sovereign nation, but that the U.S. stood by to help whenever asked. Gates with Fareed Zakaria (at around 8:10 in), with the excerpt below a follow up to what he said in ‘08:
“…we have been willing to provide the training, all the training and that kind of equipment, as much as we can, as much as they would take. There has been a reluctance on their part up to now. They don’t like the idea of a significant American military footprint inside Pakistan. I understand that. And–but we are willing to do pretty much whatever we can to help the Pakistanis in this situation. I think that we have been willing to do that for quite some time. …we are prepared to provide whatever help in developing this counterinsurgency capability to the Pakistanis that we possibly can. But it’s their country and their sovereign and we’ll let them dictate the rule.”
Once again, I refer you to Ricks above. What actually develops remains to be seen, but the set up seems to be unfolding, as is Obama’s Af-Pak strategy that treats these two countries as one, with McChrystal’s entrance another addition to the scene.
