Another bad one gone

The New York Times has an article by Pir Sha, Ismail Khan, and Sabrina Tavernise about the death of yet another Taliban leader in Pakistan:

Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of Pakistan’s fearsome Taliban militia, was killed Wednesday in a CIA missile strike, two Taliban fighters said Friday, adding that a meeting was taking place to determine which of his top deputies would replace him. American officials have not yet confirmed his death.
The Taliban fighters in northwest Pakistan, a senior leader reached by telephone in Orakzai Agency, and a local Taliban fighter in Waziristan, said that Mr. Mehsud had been receiving kidney treatment from a relative in his father-in-law’s house in the remote village of Zanghara when the building was struck by missiles fired from a remotely-piloted drone. The attack took place at 1 a.m. on Wednesday. Zanghara, in South Waziristan, has been hit repeatedly by American drone attacks, the fighters said.
The American government made killing or capturing Mr. Mehsud one of its top priorities this year, and Pakistan considered him its Number One enemy because of the widespread violence he unleashed across the country. His death would provide a boost for forces battling a resurgent Taliban at a time when President Obama is trying to marshal support for a coordinated antiterrorism strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan. “Taking Mehsud off the battlefield would be a major victory,” an American counterterrorism official said Thursday. “The world, and certainly Pakistan, would be a safer place without him.”
Mr. Mehsud, a diabetic, had been sick for some time and had come to his father-in-law’s house for a drip treatment by the relative, who was a medical practitioner, the Taliban fighters said. The fighters refused to disclose the location of the meeting called to replace him, saying they feared another drone strike. A Pakistani television channel reported that Mr. Mehsud’s top deputies were meeting in the Makeen area of South Waziristan in the mountains of western Pakistan. The broadcaster said Mr. Mehsud’s father-in-law attended the meeting in his place.
Three names have been put forward for Mr. Mehsud’s successor, Pakistani security officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter. They include his deputy, Hakimullah Mehsud, a young, brash and aggressive commander who was until recently the Taliban’s commander for the Khyber tribal region and credited with the disruption of NATO supplies to Afghanistan. Another, Waliur Rehman, is Mr. Mehsud’s relative. He is the most likely to succeed him, according to one Pakistani security official. The third is a man identified by the officials as Azmatullah Mehsud. The decision, the official said, will be influenced by another militant group in Waziristan with close ties to the Afghan militant leader, Mullah Omar. “His death leaves behind a huge vacuum,” one of the officials said.
In the immediate aftermath of the drone strike on Wednesday, residents of the village where the attack took place said that one of Mr. Mehsud’s wives had been killed and that several children had been wounded. Reports that Mr. Mehsud himself had died began to circulate on Thursday. Throughout Friday morning, Pakistani security officials said they had become increasingly certain that the reports of Mr. Mehsud’s death were accurate.
Pakistani officials said Mr. Mehsud was visiting his wife in the upper portion of a house when it was hit, though his supporters did not confirm that version of events. The Taliban, consistent with its standard procedure, threw an immediate cordon around the site of the missile strike, but the cordon was about three miles, wider than usual. No one was allowed either to enter or leave the area, Pakistani officials said. One security official cited conversations with unidentified sources in the area of the strike who said that Mr. Mehsud had been buried secretly and that associates of Mr. Mehsud had confirmed his death. The security official said he believed the funeral had been held in Nargosai, a village in the Zanghara area. But Pakistani leaders emphasized they did not have irrefutable evidence of the killing. “A lot of evidence is pouring in from the area that he’s dead,” said Rehman Malik, the Pakistani interior minister, “But I’m unable to confirm until there is solid evidence.”
Shah Mehmood Qureshi, the Pakistani foreign minister, told reporters that the authorities were heading to the area to seek evidence, but it was almost certain that Mr. Mehsud had been killed. “He has been taken out,” he said Thursday, citing intelligence sources. American officials said that, because the strike took place in a remote area where the military has no access on the ground, confirming the death could take weeks. It may never be possible to perform DNA tests because of the remoteness of the area, the officials said.
Mr. Mehsud and his military network have been blamed for a wave of violence across Pakistan, including the 2007 assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the former Pakistani prime minister. In March, he took responsibility in phone calls to news agencies for a brazen armed attack on a police academy in Punjab that killed at least eight police officers and wounded more than one hundred others. He is also suspected of sending fighters across the border into Afghanistan. The militant leader seemed to take pleasure in taunting Pakistani officials and holding news conferences to demonstrate the inability of officials in Islamabad to rein in his network. Mr. Mehsud had pledged to attack Washington, but American officials did not take the threat seriously. Still, his network is believed to have close ties to leaders of al-Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas.
The CIA had sought Mr. Mehsud this year partly at the urging of Pakistan’s civilian government. Pakistani officials, including President Asif Ali Zardari, had complained that the campaign of missile strikes by American drones was killing only militants responsible for killing American troops in Afghanistan. Since then, the State Department has offered a reward of as much as $5 million for Mr. Mehsud. The CIA also began trying to track his daily movements, and American intelligence officials believed on several occasions that they almost killed him.
Reports of Mr. Mehsud’s death have surfaced before, with varying degrees of certainty. In September 2008, a newspaper reported that Mr. Mehsud had died of kidney failure. Some government officials endorsed these reports, but weeks later, Mr. Mehsud resurfaced, hosting a feast to celebrate his second marriage.
Although President Obama has distanced himself from many of the Bush administration’s counterterrorism policies, he has embraced and even expanded the CIA’s covert campaign in Pakistan using Predator and Reaper drones. Pakistani officials publicly condemn these attacks, but they have privately given their blessing to the strikes in the country’s tribal areas, in part because the missile attacks increasingly have focused on Mr. Mehsud’s network.
Unlike other militant factions in Western Pakistan, which focus their fight on American forces in neighboring Afghanistan, Mr. Mehsud turned that war inward on the Pakistani state. Since late 2007, his suicide bombers have hit in Pakistan’s largest cities, terrifying Pakistani society in places far from where the war is being fought. He is believed to have as many as 20,000 fighters spread throughout war-torn western Pakistan, with his center of operations located in South Waziristan, the area where the Mehsud tribe lives. In an interview in 2008 to local Pakistani journalists, Mr. Mehsud said his main fight was against the United States in Afghanistan, and he justified the use of suicide bombers in that fight.
Suicide bombers, he said in the televised interview, “are our atomic weapons. The U.S. has its own, that do not distinguish between civilians and enemy when they use them. Our suicide bombers penetrate to the intended targets and explode themselves.” Mr. Mehsud boasted of attacks against Pakistani targets, including the one on the police training academy in Lahore, in central Pakistan, this spring. The Pakistani government accused him of assassinating Ms. Bhutto, but he denied responsibility. He has concluded several peace agreements with the Pakistani government over the past five years, but used the lull in fighting to expand his area of control instead of laying down weapons under the terms of the agreements. He is known to have had differences with other militants in the area. For example, he advocated the use of Uzbek fighters from Central Asia, known for their brutality and largely loathed by local residents, while other militant groups sought to ban them.
The news that Mr. Mehsud might have been killed was first reported on the website of ABC News.