American Drone Strikes Declining But Who Will Now Handle the Pakistani Terrorists

There are signs that the Obama administration be running out of high-level targets.

After a sharp rise in Mr. Obama’s first two years, the total number of drone strikes is now in sharp decline.

In Pakistan, strikes peaked in 2010 at 117; the number fell to 64 in 2011, 46 in 2012, with 11 in 2013, according to The Long War Journal, which covers the covert wars.

In Yemen, while strikes shot up to 42 in 2012, no strikes have been reported since a flurry of drone hits in January.

Mr Obama has pledged more transparency for the drone program, and he and his aides have hinted that change are coming. It remains unclear what the administration has in mind, but the president has spoken of the treacherous allure of the drone.

Decisions on targeted killing are “something that you have to struggle with. If you don’t, then it’s easy to slip into a situation in which you end up bending rules thinking that the ends always justify the means,” Mr. Obama said. “That’s not who we are as a country.”

Drone Attacks Started with the Army’s Consent

On a hot day in June 2004, the Pashtun tribesman was lounging inside a mud compound in South Waziristan, speaking by satellite phone to one of the many reporters who regularly interviewed him on how he had fought and humbled Pakistan’s army in the country’s western mountains. He asked one of his followers about the strange, metallic bird hovering above him.

Less than 24 hours later, a missile tore through the compound, severing Mr. Muhammad’s left leg and killing him and several others, including two boys, ages 10 and 16. A Pakistani military spokesman was quick to claim responsibility for the attack, saying that Pakistani forces had fired at the compound.

That was a lie.

Mr. Muhammad and his followers had been killed by the CIA, the first time it had deployed a Predator drone in Pakistan to carry out a “targeted killing.” The target was not a top operative of Al Qaeda, but a Pakistani ally of the Taliban who led a tribal rebellion and was marked by Pakistan as an enemy of the state.

In a secret deal, the CIA had agreed to kill him in exchange for access to airspace it had long sought so it could use drones to hunt down its own enemies.

That back-room bargain is critical to understanding the origins of a covert drone war that began under the Bush administration, was embraced and expanded by President Obama, and is now the subject of fierce debate. The deal, a month after a blistering internal report about abuses in the CIA’s network of secret prisons, paved the way for the CIA to change its focus from capturing terrorists to killing them, and helped transform an agency that began as a cold war espionage service into a paramilitary organization.

The CIA has since conducted hundreds of drone strikes in Pakistan that have killed thousands of people, Pakistanis and Arabs, militants and civilians alike. While it was not the first country where the United States used drones, it became the laboratory for the targeted killing operations that have come to define a new American way of fighting, blurring the line between soldiers and spies and short-circuiting the normal mechanisms by which the United States as a nation goes to war.

Neither American nor Pakistani officials have ever publicly acknowledged what really happened to Mr. Muhammad — details of the strike that killed him, along with those of other secret strikes, are still hidden in classified government databases.

CIA Chief Mr. Brennan, who began his career at the CIA and over the past four years oversaw an escalation of drone strikes from his office at the White House, has signaled that he hopes to return the agency to its traditional role of intelligence collection and analysis. But with a generation of CIA officers now fully engaged in a new mission, it is an effort that could take years.

Today, even some of the people who were present at the creation of the drone program think the agency should have long given up targeted killings.

Ross Newland, who was a senior official at the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia., when the agency was given the authority to kill Qaeda operatives, says he thinks that the agency had grown too comfortable with remote-control killing, and that drones have turned the CIA into the villain in countries like Pakistan, where it should be nurturing relationships in order to gather intelligence.

From Car Thief to Militant

By 2004, Mr. Muhammad had become the undisputed star of the tribal areas, the fierce mountain lands populated by the Wazirs, Mehsuds and other Pashtun tribes who for decades had lived independent of the writ of the central government in Islamabad. A brash member of the Wazir tribe, Mr. Muhammad had raised an army to fight government troops and had forced the government into negotiations. He saw no cause for loyalty to the ISI that had given an earlier generation of Pashtuns support during the war against the Soviets.

Many Pakistanis in the tribal areas viewed with disdain the alliance that President Musharraf had forged with the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. They regarded the Pakistani military that had entered the tribal areas as no different from the Americans — who they believed had begun a war of aggression in Afghanistan, just as the Soviets had years earlier.

Born near Wana, the bustling market hub of South Waziristan, Mr. Muhammad spent his adolescent years as a petty car thief and shopkeeper in the city’s bazaar. He found his calling in 1993, around the age of 18, when he was recruited to fight with the Taliban in Afghanistan, and rose quickly through the group’s military hierarchy. He cut a striking figure on the battlefield with his long face and flowing jet black hair.

When the Americans invaded Afghanistan in 2001, he seized an opportunity to host the Arab and Chechen fighters from Al Qaeda who crossed into Pakistan to escape the American bombing.

For Mr. Muhammad, it was partly a way to make money, but he also saw another use for the arriving fighters. With their help, over the next two years he launched a string of attacks on Pakistani military installations and on American firebases in Afghanistan.

CIA officers in Islamabad urged Pakistani spies to lean on the Waziri tribesman to hand over the foreign fighters, but under Pashtun tribal customs that would be treachery. Reluctantly, Mr. Musharraf ordered his troops into the forbidding mountains to deliver rough justice to Mr. Muhammad and his fighters, hoping the operation might put a stop to the attacks on Pakistani soil, including two attempts on his life in December 2003.

But it was only the beginning. In March 2004, Pakistani helicopter gunships and artillery pounded Wana and its surrounding villages. Government troops shelled pickup trucks that were carrying civilians away from the fighting and destroyed the compounds of tribesmen suspected of harboring foreign fighters. The Pakistani commander declared the operation an unqualified success, but for Islamabad, it had not been worth the cost in casualties.

A cease-fire was negotiated in April during a hastily arranged meeting in South Waziristan, during which a senior Pakistani commander hung a garland of bright flowers around Mr. Muhammad’s neck. The two men sat together and sipped tea as photographers and television cameras recorded the event.

Both sides spoke of peace, but there was little doubt who was negotiating from strength. Mr. Muhammad would later brag that the government had agreed to meet inside a religious madrasa rather than in a public location where tribal meetings are traditionally held. “I did not go to them; they came to my place,” he said. “That should make it clear who surrendered to whom.”

The peace arrangement propelled Mr. Muhammad to new fame, and the truce was soon exposed as a sham. He resumed attacks against Pakistani troops, and Mr. Musharraf ordered his army back on the offensive in South Waziristan.

Pakistani officials had, for several years, balked at the idea of allowing armed CIA Predators to roam their skies. They considered drone flights a violation of sovereignty, and worried that they would invite further criticism of Mr. Musharraf as being Washington’s lackey. But Mr. Muhammad’s rise to power forced them to reconsider.

The CIA had been monitoring the rise of Mr. Muhammad, but officials considered him to be more Pakistan’s problem than America’s. In Washington, officials were watching with growing alarm the gathering of Qaeda operatives in the tribal areas, and George J. Tenet, the CIA director, authorized officers in the agency’s Islamabad station to push Pakistani officials to allow armed drones. Negotiations were handled primarily by the Islamabad station.

As the battles raged in South Waziristan, the station chief in Islamabad paid a visit to Gen. Ehsan ul Haq, the ISI chief, and made an offer: If the CIA killed Mr. Muhammad, would the ISI allow regular armed drone flights over the tribal areas?

In secret negotiations, the terms of the bargain were set. Pakistani intelligence officials insisted that they be allowed to approve each drone strike, giving them tight control over the list of targets. And they insisted that drones fly only in narrow parts of the tribal areas — ensuring that they would not venture where Islamabad did not want the Americans going: Pakistan’s nuclear facilities, and the mountain camps where Kashmiri militants were trained for attacks in India.

The ISI and the CIA agreed that all drone flights in Pakistan would operate under the CIA’s covert action authority — meaning that the United States would never acknowledge the missile strikes and that Pakistan would either take credit for the individual killings or remain silent.

A New Direction

As the negotiations were taking place, the CIA’s inspector general, John L. Helgerson, had just finished a searing report about the abuse of detainees in the CIA’s secret prisons. The report kicked out the foundation upon which the CIA detention and interrogation program had rested. It was perhaps the single most important reason for the CIA’s shift from capturing to killing terrorism suspects.

The greatest impact of Mr. Helgerson’s report was felt at the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, or CTC, which was at the vanguard of the agency’s global antiterrorism operation. The center had focused on capturing Qaeda operatives; questioning them in CIA jails or outsourcing interrogations to the spy services of Pakistan, Jordan, Egypt and other nations; and then using the information to hunt more terrorism suspects.

Mr. Helgerson raised questions about whether CIA officers might face criminal prosecution for the interrogations carried out in the secret prisons, and he suggested that interrogation methods like water boarding, sleep deprivation and the exploiting of the phobias of prisoners — like confining them in a small box with live bugs — violated the UN Convention Against Torture.

The ground had shifted, and counterterrorism officials began to rethink the strategy for the secret war. Armed drones, and targeted killings in general, offered a new direction. Killing by remote control was the antithesis of the dirty, intimate work of interrogation. Targeted killings were cheered by Republicans and Democrats alike, and using drones flown by pilots who were stationed thousands of miles away made the whole strategy seem risk-free.

The Predator had been considered a blunt and unsophisticated killing tool, and many at the CIA were glad that the agency had gotten out of the assassination business long ago. Three years before Mr. Muhammad’s death, and one year before the CIA carried out its first targeted killing outside a war zone — in Yemen in 2002 — a debate raged over the legality and morality of using drones to kill suspected terrorists.

A new generation of CIA officers had ascended to leadership positions, having joined the agency after the 1975 Congressional committee led by Senator Frank Church, Democrat of Idaho, which revealed extensive CIA plots to kill foreign leaders, and President Gerald Ford’s subsequent ban on assassinations. The rise to power of this post-Church generation had a direct impact on the type of clandestine operations the CIA chose to conduct.

After Mr. Muhammad was killed, his dirt grave in South Waziristan became a site of pilgrimage.

A Pakistani journalist, Zahid Hussain, visited it days after the drone strike and saw a makeshift sign displayed on the grave: “He lived and died like a true Pashtun.”

Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan, Pakistan’s top military spokesman, told reporters at the time that “Al Qaeda facilitator” Nek Muhammad and four other “militants” had been killed in a rocket attack by Pakistani troops.

Any suggestion that Mr. Muhammad was killed by the Americans, or with American assistance, he said, was “absolutely absurd.”

One Day in the Life of a Pakistani in Boston

Living Through Terror, in Rawalpindi and Boston

By Haider Javed Warraich

NYT/ April 16, 2013

When I heard the bomb blasts sitting in a restaurant, my life, all of it, was the first. My wife, sitting across me, was the second. I yelled out to her to run, and we did, not knowing what had happened, only that it had to be something terrible.

We ran out of the food court and onto the terrace overlooking Boylston Street. We could see people fleeing from the finish line even as, in the distance, other weary marathoners kept running unknowingly toward the devastation. What was left of the food court was a land frozen in an innocent time, forks still stuck in half-eaten pieces of steak, belongings littered unattended. I felt fear beyond words.

This was not my first experience with terror, having grown up in Pakistan. But for some reason, I didn’t think back to those experiences. Looking onto to the smoked, chaotic Boylston Street, I forgot about cowering in my childhood bedroom as bombs and gunfire rained over the army headquarters in Rawalpindi, close to our house. My mind did not go back to when I stood on the roof of my dormitory in Karachi as the streets were overrun with burning buses and angry protesters after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. None of the unfortunate experiences of growing up in the midst of thousands of victims of terror, personally knowing some of them, helped me in that moment. Nothing made it any easier.

Perhaps, if I had been thinking more clearly and hadn’t had my wife with me, I might have gone down to try to help the wounded. But at that moment all I could think about was getting us out of there. We lost our friends, then found them again. Our cellphones weren’t working. And then, as we worked our way through the dazed throngs in Back Bay, I realized that not only was I a victim of terror, but I was also a potential suspect.

As a 20-something Pakistani male with dark stubble (an ode more to my hectic schedule as a resident in the intensive-care unit than to any aesthetic or ideology), would I not fit the bill? I know I look like Hollywood’s favorite post-cold-war movie villain. I’ve had plenty of experience getting intimately frisked at airports. Was it advisable to go back to pick up my friend’s camera that he had forgotten in his child’s stroller in the mall? I remember feeling grateful that I wasn’t wearing a backpack, which I imagined might look suspicious. My mind wandered to when I would be working in the intensive care unit the next day, possibly taking care of victims of the blast. What would I tell them when they asked where I was from (a question I am often posed)? Wouldn’t it be easier to just tell people I was from India or Bangladesh?

As I walked down Commonwealth Avenue, I started receiving calls from family back home. They informed me about what was unfolding on television screens across the world. I was acutely conscious of what I spoke over the phone, feeling that someone was breathing over my shoulder, listening to every word I said. Careful to avoid Urdu, speaking exclusively in English, I relayed that I was safe, and all that I had seen. I continued to naïvely cling to the hope that it was a gas explosion, a subway accident, anything other than what it increasingly seemed to be: an act of brutality targeted at the highest density of both people and cameras.

The next step was to hope that the perpetrator was not a lunatic who would become the new face of a billion people. Not a murderer who would further fan the flames of Islamophobia. Not an animal who would obstruct the ability of thousands of students to complete their educations in the United States. Not an extremist who would maim and hurt the very people who were still recovering from the pain of Sept. 11. President Obama and Gov. Deval L. Patrick have shown great restraint in their words and have been careful not to accuse an entire people for what one madman may have done. But others might not be so kind.

Haider Javed Warraich is a resident in internal medicine at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

Not All Drone Strikes Are Carried Out by the Americans

U.S. Disavows 2 Drone Strikes Over Pakistan

When news of the two latest drone strikes emerged from Pakistan’s tribal belt in early February, it seemed to be business as usual by the CIA.

Local and international media reports carried typical details: swarms of American drones had swooped into remote areas, killing up to nine people, including two senior commanders of Al Qaeda.

In Islamabad, Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry lodged an official protest with the American Embassy.

Yet there was one problem, according to three American officials with knowledge of the program: The United States did not carry out those attacks.

“They were not ours,” said one of the officials. “We haven’t had any kinetic activity since January.”

What exactly took place in those remote tribal villages, far from outside scrutiny, is unclear. But the Americans’ best guess is that one or possibly both of the strikes were carried out by the Pakistani military and falsely attributed to the CIA to avoid criticism from the Pakistani public.

E-mail and phone messages seeking comment from the Pakistani military were not returned.

If the American version is true, it is a striking irony: In the early years of the drone campaign, the Pakistani Army falsely claimed responsibility for American drone strikes in an attempt to mask C.I.A. activities on its soil. Now, the Americans suggest, the Pakistani military may be using the same program to disguise its own operations.

More broadly, the phantom attacks underscore the longstanding difficulty of gaining reliable information about America’s drone program in the remote and largely inaccessible tribal belt — particularly at a time when the program is under sharp scrutiny in Washington.

For the past month, John O. Brennan, President Obama’s counterterrorism adviser and nominee to lead the C.I.A., has been dogged by Congressional questions about the drone program’s lack of transparency, particularly when it comes to killing American citizens abroad.

The biggest obstacle to confirming details of the strikes is their location: the strikes usually hit remote, hostile and virtually closed-off areas. Foreign reporters are barred from the tribal belt, and the handful of local journalists who operate there find themselves vulnerable to pressure from both the military and the Taliban.

That murkiness has often suited the purposes of both the C.I.A. and the Pakistani military. It allows the Americans to conduct drone strikes behind a curtain of secrecy, largely shielded from public oversight and outside scrutiny. For the Pakistanis, it allows them to play both sides: publicly condemning strikes, while quietly supporting others, like the missile attack that killed the Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud in 2009.

Still, the information vacuum also places American officials at a disadvantage when it comes to answering accusations that the drone strikes kill large numbers of innocent civilians alongside bona fide militants. State Department officials have complained that they cannot effectively counter civilian death claims they believe are hugely inflated because the program is classified — a subject of lively debate inside the administration, one official said.

The private controversy over the latest strikes, however, suggested another phenomenon at work: the manipulation of the actual drone reports themselves.

The two strikes, which took place on Feb. 6 in North Waziristan and Feb. 8 in South Waziristan, went unremarked on largely because they appeared so run of the mill.

Small Pakistani news agencies and international television networks, including NBC and Al Jazeera, carried common-sounding details: accounts of multiple American drones hovering overhead, estimates of the number of missiles fired, accounts of the rescue effort by local civilians and quotes from Pakistani military officials in the tribal belt or nearby Peshawar.

“The compound was completely destroyed. The militants had surrounded the area after the attack,” one official told Agence France-Presse after the second explosion, in Babar Ghar, near Ladha, in South Waziristan.

Some reports, attributed to Pakistani officials, said the dead included two Qaeda commanders, identified as Abu Majid al-Iraqi and Sheikh Abu Waqas. Other reports said four Uzbek militants had died.

“The Pakistan Air Force does not generally undertake stand-alone strikes such as these because it is not equipped with the appropriate strike weapons,” a Pakistani military source said.

The American narrative of those strikes is very different.

Two senior United States officials said there had been no American involvement in the attacks. A third official said the C.I.A. had not paid the reports much attention because no American forces had been involved. But that official said American intelligence pointed to the Pakistan Air Force as having conducted the first strike, probably as part of a military operation against Pakistani Taliban militants in the neighboring Orakzai tribal agency.

he second attack was more mysterious. “It could have been the Pakistani military,” the official said. “It could have been the Taliban fighting among themselves. Or it could have been simply bad reporting.”

Few issues antagonize the relationship between Pakistan and the United States as much as the drone program does — or encapsulate the often contradictory, smoke-and-mirrors nature of the military-to-military relationship.

In public, both Pakistani military and government officials routinely and vehemently condemn the strikes. But in private, a handful of senior Pakistani generals are “read into” the program, according to American officials.

The United States gives the Pakistani military 30 minutes’ advance notice of drones strikes in South Waziristan. However, it gives no notice in North Waziristan, considered a bigger hub of Taliban and Qaeda militancy, and also a major base for the Haqqani Network, which carries out attacks in Afghanistan, one senior American official said.

If American claims are correct, the United States has not conducted a drone strike in Pakistan since Jan. 10, marking the longest pause of the campaign since November 2011, when the C.I.A. stopped strikes for 55 days after American warplanes killed 24 Pakistani soldiers in a disputed border clash.

Some analysts believe the lull may be connected to Mr. Brennan’s nomination, pointing to a similar slowdown in Yemen, the other major theater of American drone operation. Others point to more prosaic explanations, like intelligence delays or bad weather.

“The whole thing seems to be on pause at the moment,” said Chris Woods of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a watchdog group that tallies the drone strikes, mostly using news reports.

If one thing is clear about the drones, it is that all sides — Pakistanis, Americans and the Taliban — have an interest in manipulating reports about their impact.

Mr. Woods said he would take American claims of noninvolvement in the February attacks “with a pinch of salt,” citing the details about the Qaeda deaths as potential evidence of C.I.A. involvement.

But, Mr. Woods added, his group had earmarked reports of about a dozen drone strikes as suspicious in recent years, and had marked them as such on its Web site.

Viewed from Washington, a handful of erroneously reported strikes may seem inconsequential. According to most estimates, the C.I.A. has carried out about 330 drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal belt since 2004, the vast majority of them in the past five years. (Though the American military also operates drones, officials insist that the program in Pakistan is solely conducted by the C.I.A.)

Yet in Pakistan, they carry greater significance, igniting huge and sometimes violent anti-American demonstration that make drones a toxic subject for generals and politicians alike. But the American claims about the two attacks this month suggest that they may, also, be trying to have the best of both worlds.

 

What Led the Chechen Brothers to Terrorism in Boston?

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was an all-star wrestler at Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School.

The younger one — the one their father described as “like an angel” — gathered around him a group of friends so loyal that more than one said they would testify for him, if it came to that.

The older one, who friends and family members said exerted a strong influence on his younger sibling — “He could manipulate him,” an uncle said — once told a photographer, “I don’t have a single American friend. I don’t understand them.”

A kaleidoscope of images, adjectives and anecdotes tumbled forth on Friday to describe Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, the two brothers suspected of carrying out the bombings at the Boston Marathon that killed three people and gravely wounded scores more.

The one who was on the loose was taken into custody on Friday evening. He was the younger of the two, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19. The elder, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, was killed in a confrontation with authorities, but not before participating in the fatal shooting of an M.I.T. police officer, the carjacking of an S.U.V. and the shooting of a transit police officer, who was critically injured.

They were from Chechnya. Tamerlan was a boxer; Dzhokhar, a college student.

What no one who knew them could say was why the young men, immigrants of Chechnyan heritage, would set off bombs among innocent people. The Tsarnaevs came with their family to the United States almost a decade ago from Kyrgyzstan, after living briefly in the Dagestan region of Russia. Tamerlan, who was killed early Friday April 19, 2013 morning in a shootout with law enforcement officers, was 15 at the time. Dzhokhar, who was in custody the same evening, was only 8.

In America, they took up lives familiar to every new immigrant, gradually adapting to a new culture, a new language, new schools and new friends.

“A picture has begun to emerge of 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev as an aggressive, possibly radicalized immigrant who may have ensnared his younger brother Dzhokhar — described almost universally as a smart and sweet kid — into an act of terror.”

Dzhokhar, a handsome teenager with a wry yearbook smile, was liked and respected by his classmates at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, where celebrities like Ben Affleck and Matt Damon had walked the halls before him. A classmate remembered how elated he seemed on the night of the senior prom. Wearing a black tuxedo and a red bow tie, he was with a date among 40 students who met at a private home before the event to have their photos taken, recalled Sierra Schwartz, 20.

“He was happy to be there, and people were happy he was there,” Ms. Schwartz said. “He was accepted and very well liked.”

A talented wrestler, he was listed as a Greater Boston League Winter All-Star. “He was a smart kid,” said Peter Payack, 63, assistant wrestling coach at the school. In 2011, the year he graduated, was awarded a $2,500 scholarship by the City of Cambridge, an honor granted only 35 to 40 students a year.

For Tamerlan, life seemed more difficult.

A promising boxer, he fought in the Golden Gloves National Tournament in 2009, and he was noticed by a young photographer, Johannes Hirn, who took him as a subject for an essay assignment in a photojournalism class at Boston University. “There are no values anymore,” Tamerlan said in the essay, which was later published in Boston University’s magazine The Comment. “People can’t control themselves.”

Anzor Tsarnaev, the brothers’ father, who returned to Russia about a year ago, said in a telephone interview there that his older son was hoping to become an American citizen — Dzhokhar became a naturalized citizen in 2012, but Tamerlan still held a green card — but that a 2009 domestic violence complaint was standing in his way.

“Because of his girlfriend, he hit her lightly, he was locked up for half an hour,” Mr. Tsarnaev said. “There was jealousy there.” Tamerlan later married and had a small child. He was interviewed by the FBI in 2011 when a foreign government asked the bureau to determine whether he had extremist ties.

Yet Dzhokhar admired and emulated his older brother.

Peter Tean, 21, a high school wrestling teammate, said that he thought Dzhokhar’s intense interest in rough-and-tumble sports came from a desire to be like his brother.

“He’s done these violent sports because his brother’s a boxer,” Mr. Tean said. “He really loves his brother, looks up to him.”

At the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, Dzhokhar began to struggle academically.

According to a university transcript, he was failing many of his classes. The transcript shows him receiving seven failing grades over three semesters, including F’s in Principles of Modern Chemistry, Intro to American Politics and Chemistry and the Environment. According to the transcript, Dzhokhar received a B in Critical Writing and a D and D-plus in two other courses.

San, 22, a former classmate at the university who would identify himself only by his first name, said that Dzhokhar had told him he was having trouble in some courses.

“He was talking about how he wasn’t doing as good as he expected,” San said. “He was a really smart kid, but having a little difficulty in college because going from high school to college is totally different.”

San said that he would be willing to testify on Dzhokhar’s behalf. “I feel like all of his friends would do that,” he said.

In Cambridge, where Dzhokhar lived in the third-floor unit of a caramel-colored wood-frame triple-decker on Norfolk Street, the brothers were often seen together. It is a multicultural neighborhood where hardware stores and butcher shops are mixed with cafes and Brazilian and Portuguese restaurants. Neighbors said that people were constantly coming and going at the apartment and that they were uncertain who lived there and who was just visiting. Sometimes they saw people from the unit in the backyard. Tamerlan was fond of doing pull-ups on the trellis, they said.

The brothers’ uncle Ruslan Tsarni, 42, said that on the night before he was killed, Tamerlan had called Mr. Tsarni’s older brother. “He said to my brother the usual rubbish, talking about God again, that whatever wrong he had done on his behalf, he would like to be forgiven,” said Mr. Tsarni, who lives in Montgomery Village, Maryland., outside Washington. “I guess he knew what he had done.”

Both brothers had a substantial presence on social media sites.

On VKontakte, Russia’s most popular social media platform, Dzhokhar described his worldview as “Islam” and, asked to identify “the main thing in life,” answered “career and money.” He listed a series of affinity groups relating to Chechnya, where two wars of independence against Russia were fought after the Soviet Union collapsed, and a verse from the Koran: “Do good, because Allah loves those who do good.”

Their father said that Tamerlan would take his younger brother to Friday Prayer, but dismissed the idea that Dzhokhar had become devout, saying that they sometimes caught him smoking cigarettes.

“Dhzokhar listened to Tamerlan, of course, he also listened to us,” he said. “From childhood it was that way. He had his own head on his shoulders, he was a very gifted person. He had a gift of kindness, calmness, fairness — you understand, goodness? For him to do what they’re saying, it doesn’t it doesn’t fit him at all, it is not possible. Not at all.”

In Kyrgyzstan, the Tsarnaevs were part of a Chechen diaspora that dates back to 1943, when Stalin deported most Chechens from their homeland over concerns they were collaborating with the invading Nazi Army. Most returned to Chechnya in the 1950s, after the death of Stalin and lifting of the deportation order, but some stayed. The deportation was a searing, and in some cases, radicalizing experience.

Adnan Z. Dzarbrailov, the head of a Chechen diaspora group in Kyrgyzstan, said in a telephone interview that the Tsarnaev family lived near a sugar factory in the small town of Tokmok, about 40 miles from Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan. The last member of the family left years ago, he said. He described them as “intelligentsia” and said that Dzhokhar and Tamerlan’s aunt was a lawyer.

Yet that history does little to explain how the brothers became wanted criminals in a horrific act of terrorism, their images captured on grainy surveillance tape and broadcast across the nation.

Gilberto Junior, who owns an auto body shop in Somerville, just saw them as “regular kids,” even if they had a taste for expensive cars.

So it did not especially alarm him when Dzhokhar rushed in on Tuesday, April 16, the day after the bombing, and said he needed his car immediately, never mind that the repairs had not been done and the white Mercedes wagon had no bumper and no taillights.

The younger Tsarnaev brother seemed nervous, he said. He was biting his nails and his knees were bending back and forth a bit; it occurred to Mr. Junior that he might be on drugs.

“At the time I didn’t think about anything,” Mr. Junior said. “How could I judge him? I knew that he was nervous.”

One Zaur Tsarnaev, identified as a 26-year-old cousin of the suspects, said, “I used to warn Dzhokhar that Tamerlan was up to no good.” Tamerlan “was always getting into trouble,” he added. “He was never happy, never cheering, never smiling. He used to strike his girlfriend. He hurt her a few times. He was not a nice man. I don’t like to speak about him. He caused problems for my family.”

But what about that image of Dzhokhar as sweet?

On Friday, BuzzFeed and CNN claimed to verify Dzhokhar’s Twitter account. The tweets posted on that account give a window into a bifurcated mind — on one level, a middle-of-the-road 19-year-old boy, but on another, a person with a mind leaning toward darkness.

Like many young people, the person tweeting from that account liked rap music, saying of himself, “#imamacbookrapper when I’m bored,” and quoting rap lyrics in his tweets.

He tweeted quite a bit about women, dating and relationships; many of his musings were misogynistic and profane. Still, he seemed to want to have it both ways, to be rude and respectful at once, tweeting on Dec. 24, 2012: “My last tweets felt too wrong. I don’t like to objectify women or judge anyone for their actions.”

He was a proud Muslim who tweeted about going to mosque and enjoying talking — and even arguing — about religion with others. But he seemed to believe that different faiths were in competition with one another. On Nov. 29, he tweeted: “I kind of like religious debates, just hearing what other people believe is interesting and then crushing their beliefs with facts is fun.”

His politics seemed jumbled. He was apparently a 9/11 Truther, posting a tweet on Sept. 1 that read in part, “Idk why it’s hard for many of you to accept that 9/11 was an inside job.” On Election Day he retweeted a tweet from Barack Obama that read: “This happened because of you. Thank you.” But on March 20 he tweeted, “Evil triumphs when good men do nothing.” This sounds like a take on a quote from Edmund Burke, who is viewed by many as the founder of modern Conservatism: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had strong views on the Middle East, tweeting on Nov. 28, “Free Palestine.” Later that day he tweeted, “I was going to make a joke about Hamas but it Israeli inappropriate.”

Toward the end of 2012, the presence of dark tweets seemed to grow — tweets that in retrospect might have raised some concerns.

He tweeted about crime. On Dec. 28 he tweeted about what sounds like a hit-and-run: “Just saved a bunch of money on my car insurance by switching my car into reverse and driving away from the accident.” And on Feb. 6 he tweeted, “Everything in life can be free if you run fast enough.”

He posted other tweets that could be taken as particularly ominous.

Oct. 22: “i won’t run i’ll just gun you all out #thugliving.”

Jan. 5: “I don’t like when people ask unnecessary questions like how are you? Why so sad? Why do you need cyanide pills?”

Jan. 16: “Breaking Bad taught me how to dispose of a corpse.”

Feb. 2: “Do I look like that much of a softy?” The tweet continued with “little do these dogs know they’re barking at a lion.”

Feb. 13: “I killed Abe Lincoln during my two hour nap #intensedream.”

The last tweet on the account reads: “I’m a stress free kind of guy.” The whole of the Twitter feed would argue against that assessment.

 

Imran Khan on His Waziristan March Against Drone Attacks

When I first floated the idea of the Peace March to Waziristan, there were many sceptics who were apprehensive as to its impact. But, within a short span of time, I have been amazed at the increase in support that the idea has generated.

There are now tens of thousands of ardent supporters who want to be part of this peace odyssey to protest against a kind of barbarity that has no parallel in the international domain encompassing moral, legal and human benchmarks.

The drone strikes reflect an arrogant mindset that does not distinguish between the guilty and the innocent, between the perpetrator and the afflicted, and between the criminal and the aggrieved. Banishing all trappings of justice, this mindset is criminally oblivious to the sufferings of the peace-loving civilians of the tribal areas.

The strikes leave behind a trail of dead women, dead children and dead old people with no one held accountable. The remote-controlled flying machines are programmed to decimate them all brutally and indiscriminately.

What a shame that a country that was known for its pioneering values and its unparalleled commitment to human freedoms should stoop low to annihilate all symbols of civilised coexistence and, in the process, violate the inherent need for establishing a paradigm whereby one could go after the guilty without making the innocent suffer.

Instead of winning over the hearts and minds of the inhabitants, the US is out to drive fear in every soul that walks the earth and to make people live in awe of the mammoth killing machines that it commands. The strategy is totally counter-productive and, being a warrior race, the people of the tribal areas only end up joining the militants.

A recently-released report by the researchers at the New York University School of Law and Stanford University Law School, titled “Living under Drones: Death, Injury and Trauma to Civilians from US Drone Practices in Pakistan,” states that “the people in the areas targeted by the drone campaign are being systematically terrorised.

It is a campaign of terror-highly effective terror.” The report goes on to say that “the drone campaign terrorises men, women and children” and that “even funerals of drone victims have been targeted.” Forty Maliks holding a jirga were burned in an indiscriminate attack.

Old people and young children have been equally traumatised as a consequence of the inhuman drone campaign which has “discouraged average civilians from coming to one another’s rescue and even inhibited the provision of emergency medical assistance from humanitarian workers.” Along with so many other luminaries around the world, former US president Jimmy Carter has condemned Obama’s drone policy.

Another reprehensible factor is the complicity of the government of Pakistan in these barbaric attacks, of which there are cognisable indications. According to Wikileaks, former PM Gilani approved the US drone strikes saying: “I don’t care if they do it as long as they get the right people. We’ll protest in the National Assembly and then ignore it.”

President Zardari went even further by saying that he did not care about the “collateral damage.” Admiral Mullen, while testifying before a Senate hearing committee headed by Sen Levin, confirmed that the government of Pakistan was on board regarding the drone attacks. The government has failed in its principal responsibility to safeguard the lives and properties of its citizens as enshrined in Article 4 of the Constitution, as well as Pakistan’s security and sovereignty.

Over 40,000 citizens have been sacrificed because the government sold its soul to forces that facilitated its advent into power in Pakistan. Thanks to the ongoing military operation, most of the schools in Waziristan remain closed, depriving a generation of children of the avenues of education.

The road to peace in this part of the world goes through restive Waziristan. In spite of rendering countless sacrifices in the face of indiscriminate and barbaric drone strikes, their resolve remains paramount. While they continue to seek peace, they are not willing to compromise their honour and self-respect, no matter how daunting the challenges that they may have to confront.

The PTI’s Peace March to Waziristan is an effort to recognise the resolve of the people of the area and initiate an international drive to make the dream of peace possible.

Alongside hundreds of thousands of other people, we are joined in this endeavour by the leading human rights activists of the US, including Clive Stafford Smith from Reprieve, former US envoy Mary Ann Wright from Code Pink and Leah Bolger from Veterans for Peace.

They’ll all meet the affectees of the drone campaign and the tribal leaders of Waziristan and see first-hand the kind of trauma and terror that this inhuman campaign has unleashed. This Peace March will also reiterate the resolve that there is no submitting before the barrel of the gun.

At a different level, the PTI’s Peace March is also an effort to end the alienation of the people of Waziristan who have been unjustly bracketed with the bands of extremists.

The true face of their inheritance and the proud traditions that they are the custodians of should be brought forth to the notice of the people of the world so that they could together pursue the dream of peace with honour. This will happen once we disengage from this so-called “war on terror.”

That’s when Pakistan will no longer be perceived as fighting the US war and the local militants will stop thinking of the conflict as a jihad against foreign intervention. Peace will come when the tribal people, in the hundreds and thousands, move over to our side and then proceed to take care of a few thousand militants.

The drone strikes constitute a flawed policy which has only increased anti-US feelings and extremism in Pakistan. The US has tried to subjugate the proud people of the area by using all its killer machines, but has failed. That’s why it is now contemplating withdrawal from Afghanistan by 2014.

I believe that the date should be advanced substantially so that the US is able to avoid leaving behind an unmistakable trail of animosity that may continue to haunt it for generations.

The PTI Peace March will provide the US a chance to change course that will not only benefit the people of the area, but also the US in nullifying considerably the hate-filled legacy that it has nurtured for over a decade of inhuman presence here.

Together, let’s all give peace a chance – a genuine chance!

Israel Scared of Iranian Bomb Due to its Deterrence Value

The Middle East is facing an acute danger of war, with unpredictable and potentially devastating consequences for countries and populations of the region.

A ‘shadow war’ is already being waged — by Israel and the US — against Iran; by a coalition of countries against Syria; and by the great powers against each other. A mere spark could set this tinder alight.

The threat of a hot war is coming from three main directions: first, from Israel’s relentless and increasingly hysterical war-mongering against Iran; second, from America’s geopolitical ambitions in the oil-rich Gulf and its complicity in Israel’s anti-Iranian campaign; and third, from the hostility of some Sunni states towards Iran — and towards Shiites and Alawites in general.

These Arab states are apparently unaware that they are playing into the hands of Israeli and American hawks who dream of re-modelling the region in order to subject it to their will. This same neo-con ambition drove the US to invade and destroy Iraq in the hope of permanently enfeebling it.

The current Israeli war fever rests on a blatant falsehood: that Iran poses an ‘existential threat’ to the Jewish people. The only threat Iran poses is this: were it to develop the means and skills to build an atomic weapon — without actually doing so — it would thereby acquire a limited deterrent capability. That is to say, Israel might hesitate to attack it. Israel’s freedom to attack its other neighbours would also be restricted — a freedom it has enjoyed for decades, as may be seen from its numerous wars and assaults on the Palestinians, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria.

This is what the fuss is all about. It wants the freedom to hit Iran and any other country that dares raise its head, without the risk of being hit back. It does not want any Middle East state or movement to be able to protect itself — hence its bitter animus against resistance movements such as Hezbollah and Hamas, which have survived Israeli attempts to destroy them, and refuse to be cowed.

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Ehud Barak are evidently itching to bring down the regime in Tehran — and indeed the whole so-called ‘resistance axis’ of Iran, Syria and Hezbollah, which in recent years has been the only credible barrier to Israeli and American ambitions. But the Arabs should reflect that the destruction of this barrier will mean abandoning the Palestinians to their tragic fate and exposing the Gulf states to future Israeli and American pressures and possible assaults.

Israel would, of course, prefer the US to bring down the Iranian regime by itself — much as it brought down Saddam Hussain’s regime in Iraq. Netanyahu may be tempted to strike first, but only if he is sure that President Barack Obama will join in the attack or be compelled to do so, because of his alleged need to win Jewish votes in November’s presidential elections. Obama desperately wants to avoid being dragged into another war. To head off an Israeli attack, he has, in the words of his spokesman, imposed on Iran “the most stringent sanctions ever imposed on any country”.

A solution to the crisis lies in the hands of the two major regional powers, Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Although they are often seen as rivals, they could also be partners, since they share a strong interest in the peace and security of the Gulf. There are small but promising signs that they are reaching out to each other.

It is striking that the recent NAM Summit meeting in Tehran reached much the same conclusions regarding the civil war in Syria as gathering in Riyadh of members of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC). Participants at both meetings stressed the need for a ceasefire to stop the bloodshed, followed by political negotiations and the formation of a national unity government. A hopeful sign was the presence of Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the OIC summit in Riyadh.

Disastrous as it is, the Syrian civil war is only a sub-plot in a far wider contest. Whether President Bashar Al Assad remains temporarily at the head of the regime, or is persuaded to quit, is far from being the main issue. Those pressing for war do not care about who rules in Damascus. They simply want Syria enfeebled, preferably dismembered, and its allies crippled.

Issues of profound importance for the Arabs are at stake in this ferocious test of wills. Will the existing pattern of Arab nation states survive the crisis or will it fracture? Can Sunnis and Shiites learn to live together in harmony under the banner of Islam or are they doomed to fight each other for another thousand years? Can the security of ethnic and religious minorities, which have contributed for centuries to the rich diversity of the region, be guaranteed? And what will be the outcome for Arab independence itself?

We are witnessing today the latest phase of the struggle for Arab independence. It began a century ago when the Arabs sought to throw off Ottoman rule. But when the Ottoman Empire collapsed in the First World War, the Arabs fell instead under the control of Britain and France who divided the Arab world between them. And when these colonial powers were finally forced out, the Arabs were confronted by the even deadlier threat of an aggressive and expansionist Israel.

American influence over the region has long been predominant, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union a generation ago. Today, as the US wrestles with economic problems and the legacy of catastrophic wars, it is also being challenged by new emergent powers. A further handicap for the US is that it has allowed Israel to dictate its Middle East policy. The Arabs should reflect that a regional war, driven by Israel, risks robbing them of the little real independence they have so far managed to secure.

Can war be prevented? King Abdullah Bin Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia is one of the wisest leaders on the international stage. He alone has the political weight, the resources, and the influence with both the US and the rebels in Syria to check the region’s downward rush to disaster. He seems torn between his understandable distaste for some Iranian policies and his instinctive understanding of the need for better Saudi-Iranian relations. Several Gulf officials, in turn, are torn between their fear of a powerful Iran and their understanding that members of the Gulf Cooperation Council share many commercial and strategic interests with the Islamic Republic.

Instead of siding with the US and Israel in the destruction of Iran and Syria, Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies should join with Iran in building a new security system for the region free from external meddling. If they act together, they can spare the region the devastation of war. But they must act soon because time is running out.

Patrick Seale is a commentator and author of several books on Middle East affairs, Al Assad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East and Abu Nidal: A Gun for Hire

People With Mental Disabilities Used In Suicide Attacks

Iraqi intelligence is saying that al-Qaeda is using individuals with mental disabilities to carry out suicide attacks, because of a shortage of suicide bombers in its ranks. In one case, security forces discovered gunmen holding three people with mental disabilities aged between 15 and 25. These people do “not know or are unaware of what they are doing when al-Qaeda sends them to detonate in the middle of crowds of people,” said an Interior Ministry representative.

The case in Pakistan is no different except that it may not be so difficult to find folks with mental disability as may be the case in some of the other countries.

Al Qaeeda to go On Strike in the UK

Muslim suicide bombers in Britain are set to begin a three-day strike next Monday in a dispute over the number of virgins they are entitled to in the afterlife. Emergency talks with Al Qaeda have so far failed to produce an agreement.

The unrest began last Tuesday when Al Qaeda announced that the number of virgins a suicide bomber would receive after his death will be cut by 25% this April from 72 to only 54. The rationale for the cut was the increase in recent years of the number of suicide bombings and a subsequent shortage of virgins in the afterlife.

The suicide bombers’ union, the British Organization of Occupational Martyrs (BOOM) responded with a statement that this was unacceptable to its members and immediately balloted for strike action. General Secretary Abdullah Amir told the press :

 ”Our members are literally working themselves to death in the cause of Jihad. We don’t ask for much in return but to be treated like this is a kick in the teeth”.

Speaking from his shed in Tipton in the West Midlands in which he currently resides, an Al Qaeda chief executive explained :

 ”We sympathize with our workers’ concerns but Al Qaeda is simply not in a position to meet their demands. They are simply not accepting the realities of modern-day Jihad in a competitive marketplace. Thanks to Western depravity, there is now a chronic shortage of virgins in the afterlife. It’s a straight choice between reducing expenditure and laying people off. I don’t like cutting wages but I’d hate to have to tell 3000 of my staff that they won’t be able to blow themselves up.”
 

Spokespersons for the union in Newcastle, Bradford, Sunderland, Leeds, Middlesbrough, Manchester, Glasgow, Liverpool, Rochester and Doncaster stated that they would be unaffected, as there are no virgins in these areas anyway.

Apparently the drop in the number of suicide bombings has been largely put down to the emergence of the Scottish singing star, Susan Boyle.

Now that Muslims know what a virgin looks like, they are not so keen on going to paradise……

Pakistan’s Tribal Belt Remains a Hub of Regional &International Militancy

A CIA drone strike in Pakistan’s tribal belt killed Al Qaeda’s deputy leader, Abu Yahya al-Libi, dealing another blow to the group in a lawless area that has long been considered the global headquarters of international terrorism but the importance of which may now be slipping.

The details of his death in Hassu Khel, a village in the North Waziristan tribal agency, remained hazy. And it is not the first report that he has been killed: rumors of his death coursed through jihadi Web sites in December 2009 after a similar strike in South Waziristan that American officials claimed had killed a high-ranking figure in Al Qaeda.

Mr. Libi, who was thought to be in his late 40s, was born in Libya, and during the 1990s he was a member of an Islamist group that sought to overthrow Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.

His star rose after he escaped from a United States military detention center at Bagram Air Base outside Kabul in July 2005, picking a lock and dodging the prison guards, along with three other Qaeda operatives.

A year later, Mr. Libi released a 54-minute video mocking his American captors — the first of many that would burnish his reputation as a propagandist.

Soon after Bin Laden’s death, Mr. Libi moved up to become Al Qaeda’s deputy, behind Ayman al-Zawahri.

If his death is borne out this time, it would be a milestone in a covert eight-year airstrike campaign that has infuriated Pakistani officials but that has remained one of the United States’ most effective tools in combating militancy.

Libi’s death would be another dramatic moment for an American covert war in Pakistan that has been particularly active over the past year, starting with the death of the group’s founder, Osama bin Laden, in May 2011 and followed up by drone strikes against several senior lieutenants, including Atiyah Abd al-Rahman.

But that very success could, paradoxically, signal a shifting target: as Al Qaeda’s leadership in the tribal belt has been cornered or killed, new efforts to attack Western targets have been mounted by the group’s affiliates in Yemen and Somalia.

While drone strikes offer an attractive short-term tactic against Qaeda militants, they do not present a complete strategy. Until the West tackles Al Qaeda’s ideology, state support and ability to exploit ungoverned space in countries like Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, you’re not going to defeat the organization.

Mr. Libi’s death also raises questions about the center of gravity of Al Qaeda’s global operations. In 2007, the National Intelligence Estimate, a document produced by 16 American intelligence agencies, declared that the tribal belt had become Al Qaeda’s global headquarters. Yet in recent years, some of the most dangerous plots have come from its affiliate in Yemen.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the young Nigerian who tried to detonate a bomb in his underwear as an airliner approached Detroit in December 2009, was trained in the mountains of Yemen. Last September, an American drone attack 90 miles east of the Yemeni capital, Sana, killed Anwar al-Awlaki, an American preacher and jihadist recruiter, and Samir Khan, an American citizen of Pakistani origin.

Some American officials consider Mr. Awlaki’s death to be at least as significant, in counterterrorism terms, as the killing of Mr. Libi. Even in death, Mr. Awlaki’s archived exhortations for jihad are considered a potent force.

Still, Pakistan’s tribal belt remains a hub of regional and international militancy. Faisal Shahzad, who tried to explode a car bomb in Times Square in May 2010, said he had received explosives training from the Pakistani Taliban. Insurgent fighters based in Waziristan regularly attack NATO and Afghan forces in Afghanistan and have been targeted by C.I.A. drones. And Mr. Zawahri, the Qaeda leader, is widely believed to be in Pakistan.

But the strikes are intensely contentious among Pakistan’s political and military elite. In April, Pakistan’s Parliament passed a resolution demanding that the drone campaign immediately stop, but the tempo of strikes picked up greatly after negotiations to reopen NATO supply lines through Pakistan to Afghanistan bogged down last month.

Practically speaking, the drone strikes are a big success. But strategically they are a huge loss. They create more polarization, more enemies, and are an attack on our sovereignty. We have always told the Americans that if anyone should carry out these strikes, it should be us.

 

“Until we tackle Al Qaeda’s ideology, state support and ability to exploit ungoverned space in countries like Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, you’re not going to defeat the organization.”

BILL ROGGIO, the managing editor of The Long War Journal, on the significance of a drone strike in Pakistan that is said to have killed Abu Yahya al-Libi, Al Qaeda’s deputy leader.