CIA strikes back: Top Pakistan Taliban leader believed killed in drone missile strike

Hakimullah Mehsud as he looked before a Hellfire missile mashed him up

Hakimullah Mehsud took over the leadership of the Pakistani Taliban only last August after a CIA drone-fired missile strike killed the previous Taliban kingpin, Baithullah Mehsud.

Now, another CIA missile strike may have killed Hakimullah in Pakistan's wild North Waziristan region:

A CIA drone strike on a suspected militant hideout today killed 12 people in an attack aimed at killing the top Taleban commander in Pakistan.

A local tribal leader said Hakimullah Mehsud was killed in the early-morning raid, but the Taleban insisted he was still alive. Pakistani officials have not yet made any claim over his fate.

In the strike a pair of missiles hit a mud-walled compound which previously housed an Islamic seminary in Pasalkot village in North Waziristan where Mehsud, the chief of the Pakistani Taleban movement, was believed to be staying.

Pakistani security officials confirmed Mehsud was the target. He had succeeded Baithullah Mehsud last year after he was killed in a drone strike on his house in South Waziristan last August.

Since the December suicide bombing attack on a CIA base in Afghanistan that killed seven CIA personnel, far from dealing CIA operations a blow, the missile strikes have come faster and more furious:

The drone strikes have intensified in the region since then. As many as 45 people have been killed in eight strikes in the past two weeks. Last weekend, a Jordanian militant who served as a bodyguard for al-Qaeda's third in command is believed to have been killed in one of two strikes close to Mir Ali.

We last saw Hakimullah just days ago when the mass murderer was trying to glom onto some "credit" for the attack on the CIA:

If confirmed, the death of Mehsud would come as a very serious blow to the Taleban, which has been responsible for most of the deaths of over 700 people in terrorist attacks inside Pakistan in the past year.

Last week the Taleban released a video showing Mehsud sitting with the Jordanian double agent who carried out the suicide bombing at the CIA base. The attack demonstrated the close links between Pakistani Taleban and al-Qaeda.

If he escaped this time, there will be a next time -- probably very soon.

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UPDATE -- The Times of India reports that the Taliban says Hakimullah Mehsud was "injured" in the missile strike but is not dead. We'll see. When Baithullah Mehsud was killed last August, the Taliban was loathe to confirm his death, in part due to an immediate internal struggle for leadership.

Pantybomber aftermath: Obama says "system failed," calls it "intolerable" but stands by his national security team!

President Obama says someone "failed to connect the dots." But who?

Speaking yesterday at the White House after meeting for the first time since the Christmas terrorist attack with his whole national security team, President Obama minced no words about failure of the U.S. Government to head off this mortal threat.

President Obama said Tuesday that the government had sufficient information to uncover the terror plot to bring down a commercial jetliner on Christmas Day, but that intelligence officials had “failed to connect those dots.”

“This was not a failure to collect intelligence,” Mr. Obama said after meeting with his national security team for nearly two hours. “It was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had.”

Obama said he wants action -- now:

I want specific recommendations for corrective actions to fix what went wrong,” said Mr. Obama, who was speaking in the Grand Foyer of the White House. “I want those reforms implemented immediately, so that this doesn’t happen again and so we can prevent future attacks.”

The "failure to integrate" charge seemed to point in one particular direction:

Mr. Obama’s stark assessment that the government failed to properly analyze and integrate intelligence served as a sharp rebuke of the country’s intelligence agencies, including the National Counterterrorism Center, the organization set up after the Sept. 11 attacks to ensure that the government had a central clearinghouse for spotting, assessing and thwarting terrorist threats.

Yet, it appears that no one's head is on the chopping block:

But Mr. Obama insisted that he was not interested in getting into a blame game. White House officials said the president was standing by his top national security advisers, including those whose agencies failed to communicate with one another.

Pointing no fingers himself, Obama told the 20-odd senior national security officials that "he would not 'tolerate' finger-pointing" among themselves.

But here's the serious trouble with that. Mr. President: if everyone is to blame for a major failure to protect the American people, then no one is to blame. Saying you'll hold people accountable is pretty much meaningless, if you don't actually hold anyone accountable!

The "system" that "failed" wasn't set up yesterday and needs some time to work out the bugs. The National Counterterrorism Center was set up in 2004 and placed under the new Director of National Intelligence when the latter office was established in early 2005. The FBI's Terrorist Screening Center was created in 2003. And the Department of Homeland Security was established by Congress in 2002. All the other involved agencies have been around much longer.

So if someone "screwed up," in the President's words, who was it? If Obama, Congress and the rest of us don't know, how can we be sure the problem or problems ever get fixed?

Was it the National Counterterrorism Center, which was set up pursuant to the 9/11 Commission's recommendation precisely to connect the dots? Was it the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center which maintains the U.S. Government's consolidated terrorist watch lists? Was it CIA officers in Nigeria or at Langley? Was it the State Department? Did DHS drop the ball? NSA had some intercepts, we're told, but did they share everything? And what about the Brits' report that their intelligence officials shared important information tying Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to extremists a year ago? Last but not least, has the White House been on top of potential problems and fixes for them in the year since Obama took office?

No one should let any of this drop unless and until we see the actual people who screwed up directly or indirectly by virtue of their management or policy-making responsibilities pay a price.
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September 11, 2001 plus eight: Let's never forget

One thing about the evolution of Americans' views -- and disagreements -- about the 9/11 attacks that I'll never understand is the almost total lack of interest in what took place in Afghanistan as the U.S. counter-attacked swiftly and with devastating effect on al Qaeda. In brief, while the Pentagon had no contingency plans to operate inside land-locked Afghanistan, a tiny team of seven CIA officers, led by veteran Gary Schroen (who was pulled back from planned retirement), flew in an old Soviet helicopter over the Hindu Kush into the Panjshir Valley on September 23rd. For nearly a month, Shroen's team were the only Americans on this battlefront, gathering intelligence, forging an alliance with local Afghans, and developing the strategy and tactics that would result in the Taliban and al Qaeda being quickly routed with remarkably little loss of life.

As Shroen summed it up in a compelling and informative "Frontline" interview:

What happened there in those last few months of 2001 to me was a validation of what the agency could be and should be. We were ready; we had established contacts long before anybody thought we'd needed them; ... we had the means in the area to allow us to infiltrate into the hostile territory to meet with [Afghan] colleagues there who were besieged. We had the area knowledge; we had language skills. We did it right. We did it cheap. ... We probably, in my little operation in the Panjshir Valley, spent about $6 million during that period, and we ended up freeing the northern half of the country for probably $10 million total, and no loss of American life, except for [former Marine and CIA agent] Mike Spann, unfortunately. ...

On 9/11/09, read the whole interview. You'll be glad you did.

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Reports: CIA drone-fired missile attack kills Baitullah Mehsud, leader of Pakistani Taliban

Waziristan Taliban chieftain Baitullah Mehsud in better times

We may never know for sure, but it's being reported widely that a CIA missile has blown Pakistan's most wanted terrorist, Baitullah Mehsud, the killer of Benazir Bhutto among countless other victims, to smithereens:

"There is strong indication" that Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud was killed in a CIA drone strike that targeted a house Wednesday, a senior administration official told ABC News.

U.S. and Pakistani officials believe Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud is dead. U.S. and Pakistani officials believe that a strike in South Waziristan yesterday "very likely" killed Mehsud. U.S. officials said they had visual and other "indicators" that it was Mehsud, and that there is a 95 percent chance that he is among the dead. Pakistani officials are trying to collect physical evidence to be certain.

Baitullah Mehsud is enemy number one in Pakistan. He is believed to be behind some of the most spectacular attacks in that country, including the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in December 2007 and suicide bombings in Lahore.

Recently, the CIA concentrated resources on tracking and targeting Mehsud partly at the behest of Pakistan's civilian government, led by Bhutto's husband, sif Ali Zardari. So Islamabad should be a bit happier place today.

This latest success should teach everyone a lesson about the capabilities of the CIA and America's intelligence community, which have lately come in for a wide range of criticisms from the left and the right. The CIA's Hellfire missiles fired from Predator and Reaper drone aircraft have been killing al Qaeda and Taliban leaders and fighters a lot more effectively than anything else being done by any arm of the U.S. Government or our allies.

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UPDATE -- The New York Times reports that the Taliban has confirmed Mehsud's death last Wednesday in a CIA missile strike.