17 January 2010

Oops is now a CIA term

Farhan Bokhari and Matthew Green have an article in the Financial Times about a narrow escape, unfortunately:
The leader of Pakistan’s Taliban, who is suspected of involvement in the bombing of a Central Intelligence Agency base in Afghanistan, narrowly escaped a strike by US drones on Thursday that killed thirteen suspected militants, Pakistani security officials said. A senior Pakistani official said Hakimullah Mehsud may have been wounded when missiles hit a compound where he was believed to have been hiding. The CIA has launched a string of attacks on targets in Pakistan’s tribal areas since last month’s suicide attack on their base in eastern Afghanistan.
“For the Americans, Hakimullah Mehsud is now their public enemy number one. They want to target him at any cost,” the Pakistani security official told the Financial Times. “It was a close call for Hakimullah. He seems lucky to have survived.”
Video footage aired at the weekend showed Mr. Mehsud seated next to a Jordanian doctor-turned suicide bomber, who managed to kill seven CIA personnel in the bombing of the base. The CIA attack followed an elaborate game of espionage in which the Jordanian, Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, had managed to convince CIA agents that he might be able to offer them valuable information in their hunt for the leaders of al-Qaeda. The video represented a propaganda coup for Mr. Mehsud, by showing his group was involved in an attack that inflicted the worst single-day losses on the CIA since the Beirut embassy bombing in 1983. It also propelled him higher up the league of the CIA’s most wanted targets.
The missile strike on Thursday triggered a swirl of rumours that Mr. Mehsud might have met the same fate as his predecessor as the head of Pakistan’s Taliban movement, Baitullah Mehsud, who was killed by a CIA drone strike in August. A US official commenting on reports of Mr. Mehsud’s possible death said: “While that’s not something I can confirm, the world would certainly be better off without him.”
Azam Tariq, a spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban, denied reports Mr. Mehsud had been killed. “He is safe. These are just rumours. He was not there when the attack took place,” he told Reuters.

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