U.S. Steps Up Unilateral Strikes in Pakistan

Daniel Markey, a former State Department policy planning staffer who is now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said "the new faces" in Pakistan's leadership "are not certain how they want to manage their relationship with the United States. You can't blame them," because they are pulled in opposite directions by their electorate and the Bush administration.

But Kamran Bokhari, a Pakistani who directs Middle East analysis for Strategic Forecasting, a private intelligence group in Washington, said the new government will almost certainly take a harder line against such strikes. "These . . . are very unpopular, not because people support al-Qaeda, but because they feel Pakistan has no sovereignty," he said.

The latest Predator strike, on March 16, killed about 20 people in the Shahnawaz Kot village in South Waziristan, a mountainous enclave on Pakistan's western border with Afghanistan. According to accounts confirmed by Pakistani officials, at least three missiles hit a compound owned by Noorullah Wazir, a tribal leader in an area implicated in numerous cross-border attacks by Islamic militants into eastern Afghanistan.

The attack destroyed Wazir's home and damaged nearby buildings. Among those killed were several Arab and Afghan militants, Pakistani officials said. The identities of the dead have not been publicly confirmed, although U.S. and Pakistani sources say that no prominent al-Qaeda or Taliban leaders were among the victims.

An attack in the early hours of Feb. 28 struck a house in the village of Kaloosha, also in South Waziristan, killing 12 people described by local authorities as foreign militants. And on Jan. 29, missiles fired by a CIA drone in nearby North Waziristan killed Abu Laith al-Libi, a senior al-Qaeda commander and the man believed to be behind a bombing last year that killed 23 people at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan.

All three of the precision attacks against small clusters of Islamic militants were carried out by CIA-operated MQ-1B drones -- pilotless, camera-equipped aircraft operated by remote control and armed with 100-pound Hellfire missiles.

U.S. intelligence officials estimate that al-Qaeda has several hundred operatives in the Waziristan tribal region. "But as we learned on 9/11, it only takes 19," said the senior U.S. official. "These are not Tora Bora bomb-everything operations," he added, referring to the blanket bombing of Afghanistan's mountainous area where al-Qaeda leaders were hiding in late 2001.

A spokesman at CIA headquarters declined to comment on the strikes. The agency officially maintains a policy of strict secrecy regarding its counterterrorism operations in the border region.

But other U.S. officials said that after months of prodding, the Bush administration and the Musharraf government reached a tacit understanding this year that gave Washington a freer hand to carry out precision strikes against al-Qaeda and its allies in the border region. The issue is a sensitive one that neither side is willing to discuss openly, the officials said.

Asked for comment, Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell denied that the two governments have an "arrangement" or an "understanding," but said that they face a mutual enemy and that "everything we do to go after terrorists operating there is in consultation and coordination with the Pakistani government."

Thomas H. Johnson, a research professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., said: "People inside the Beltway are aware that Musharraf's days are numbered, and so they recognize they may only have a few months to do this. Musharraf has . . . very few friends in the world -- he probably has more inside the Beltway than in his own country."

The administration's intensified anti-al-Qaeda effort also has benefited from shifting loyalties among residents of the border region. Some tribal and religious leaders who embraced foreign al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters as they fled from Afghanistan in 2001 now see them as troublemakers and are providing timely intelligence about their movements and hideouts, according to former U.S. officials and Pakistan experts.