The Blunt Instruments of War

If a U.S. attempt to kill Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s second in command, was indeed a failure last week, it could prove a costly one. In human terms alone, the price was high. Local reports say 18 people, mostly women and children, were killed by the CIA-directed missile strike on the village of Damadola, close to Pakistan’s northwest border. U.S. officials say al-Zawahiri was the intended target.

DNA tests on the victims will determine whether al-Zawahiri was among the dead, but at week’s end Pakistani officials were saying he had not even been in the village. An Arabic TV station, quoting sources close to al-Qaeda, said Saturday he was alive and well, while U.S. officials insisted it was too early to conclude that they had missed him.

Villagers staged angry protests, condemning the U.S. for the killing of innocents. An official in Islamabad worried that demonstrations could spread. The Pakistani government has never had firm control over the borderlands, where many tribes see President Pervez Musharraf as a traitor for cooperating with the U.S. Musharraf is especially sensitive to claims that he allows the U.S. to conduct military operations in Pakistan. U.S. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker was summoned to the foreign ministry to receive a formal protest. Information Minister Sheik Rashid Ahmed announced, “We will not allow such incidents to reoccur.” But U.S. officials insist that some of the intelligence for the strike was provided by Pakistan’s intelligence service.

The CIA strategy of targeting top terrorists with missiles has had some reported successes: last month, a missile took out Abu Hamza Rabia, said to be al-Qaeda’s third-ranking leader. But such strikes require highly accurate local intelligence, which is in short supply. “I’ve seen intelligence reports that have the top al-Qaeda leadership all over a huge geographical area out there,” says a senior Pentagon official. A lot of the intelligence, he notes, “comes from people who are deliberately trying to deceive us.” Operations that kill innocents make things worse. “It alienates precisely the population whose support you need,” says Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Rand. “And it provides propaganda to our enemies–that our violence kills innocent women and children, so how is it different from theirs?”