Ishtiaq Mahsud/Associated Press
Wali ur-Rehman, center, the deputy leader of the Pakistani Taliban, in 2011. Reports conflicted about his death.
By MARK MAZZETTI and DECLAN WALSH
Published: May 29, 2013 235 Comments
WASHINGTON — Less than a week after President Obama outlined a new direction for the secret drone wars, Pakistani officials said that a C.I.A. missile strike on Wednesday killed a top member of the Pakistani Taliban, an attack that illustrated the continued murkiness of the rules that govern the United States’ targeted killing operations.
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The drone strike in Pakistan’s tribal belt, along the Afghan border, was the first since Mr. Obama announced what his administration billed as sweeping changes to the drone program, with new limits on who would be targeted and more transparency in reporting such strikes.
But in the days since the president’s speech, American officials have asserted behind the scenes that the new standards would not apply to the C.I.A. drone program in Pakistan as long as American troops remained next door in Afghanistan — a reference to Mr. Obama’s exception for an “Afghan war theater.” For months to come, any drone strikes in Pakistan — the country that has been hit by the vast majority of them, with more than 350 such attacks by some estimates — will be exempt from the new rules.
American officials refused to publicly confirm the drone strike or the death of the Pakistani Taliban’s deputy leader, Wali ur-Rehman, even as Pakistani government and militant figures reported that he had been killed. Thus, the promise of new transparency, too, seemed to be put off.
Still, by one measure, Mr. Rehman would seem to fit the new road map for drone strikes: the threshold laid out by Mr. Obama that the target of the strike pose a “continuing and imminent threat” to United States citizens.
Mr. Rehman already had a $5 million United States bounty on his head, and American officials accuse him both of organizing attacks on American troops in Afghanistan and playing a role in the 2009 attack on a C.I.A. base in the eastern part of the country that killed seven agency employees. Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, would not confirm the strike during his briefing Wednesday afternoon, but he emphasized a long list of American accusations against Mr. Rehman.
Inside Pakistan, where Mr. Rehman’s death could deal a potentially serious blow to an insurgency that has killed thousands of people, the drone strike provoked a complex set of reactions. The Foreign Ministry quickly condemned the strike in a statement, while the incoming prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, who is due to take office next week, has vowed to restrict drone activity as part of a broader tightening of relations with the United States.
Against that, however, many other Pakistanis are unlikely to regret Mr. Rehman’s death. As the Taliban’s deputy leader, he orchestrated suicide bombings that have killed thousands of civilians and Pakistani military personnel over the past six years.
Since the beginning of the C.I.A.’s drone war in Pakistan in 2004, American officials have at times tried to placate Pakistani officials by killing militants who pose a greater threat to Pakistan than they do the United States — including a June 2004 drone strike against Nek Muhammad and an August 2009 attack that killed Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban.
Some in Washington came to refer to these strikes as “good-will kills,” suggesting that some officials in Islamabad and Rawalpindi, the Pakistani military headquarters, would cheer them.
Mr. Rehman has long been thought to be the Pakistani Taliban’s main operations leader, and some Pakistani analysts and conservative leaders speculated that his death could make it harder for the government to strike a peace deal with the Taliban, because Mr. Rehman was seen as less extreme than its fugitive leader, Hakimullah Mehsud.
In many ways, Mr. Rehman embodies the metamorphosis of the Pakistani Taliban in the years after the 2001 terror attacks from a group of disgruntled tribal militants into a destructive force nurtured by Al Qaeda and aiming its weapons — guns and rockets, but also teenage suicide bombers — inside Pakistan and beyond.
Pakistan’s military says more than 40,000 civilians and soldiers have died since 2001 from militant violence, the majority since the Taliban insurgency fully erupted in 2007. In the past year, the Pakistani Taliban started to kill polio vaccinators in the northwest — the latest casualty a female health worker on Tuesday.
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More recently, it sought to influence the May 11 election by targeting candidates of secular parties and their supporters, 130 of whom died in the final month of campaigning.
The group has sought to expand its attacks to Americans, including on American territory. In addition to playing a role in the Khost bombing, the group helped train Faisal Shahzad, the naturalized American citizen who tried to detonate a car bomb in Times Square in May 2010. American officials also accuse the Pakistani Taliban of carrying out a multipronged attack on the United States Consulate in Peshawar in April 2010 that killed 6 Pakistanis and wounded 20.
Two Pakistani security officials, one speaking from Peshawar, the regional capital, said that Mr. Rehman was among five people killed when missiles fired from a drone struck a house outside Miram Shah, the main town in the tribal district of North Waziristan, about 3 a.m. Wednesday.
A local resident, reached by phone, said that shortly after the strikes, three pickup trucks carrying fighters rushed to the site to retrieve bodies and look for wounded militants. Two Uzbek militants were also killed, Pakistani officials said.
A Taliban commander, speaking in a telephone interview on the condition of anonymity, confirmed that Mr. Rehman was among the dead. But the official Taliban spokesman said he had no such information. “I am neither denying nor confirming it,” the spokesman, Ehsanullah Ehsan, said in a phone interview.
In a statement Wednesday, Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs expressed “serious concerns” over the drone strike, saying such attacks “violate the principles of national sovereignty, territorial integrity and international law.”
The C.I.A. has carried out about 360 drone strikes in Pakistan since 2004, but the attacks’ pace has dropped sharply this year amid scrutiny of the program in the United States. There have been at least 13 strikes this year, according to a London-based watchdog group, the Bureau of Independent Journalism.
The identity of those killed in drone strikes is notoriously difficult to confirm because the remote tribal areas are inaccessible to foreign and most local journalists. Previously Mr. Rehman’s boss, Hakimullah Mehsud, was falsely reported to have died in a drone strike in 2010, only to emerge unscathed months later.
But the volume and variety of sources — official and militant — that reported the attack on Mr. Rehman suggested he had indeed been killed.
In his early 40s and from a mountainous district of South Waziristan, Mr. Rehman has grown in prominence over the past two years as the group’s top leader, Mr. Mehsud, was hunted by American drones. In addition to that, the two men developed serious differences over the direction of the insurgency.
While Mr. Mehsud adhered to the hard-line Salafist strain of Islam, and aligned himself with Qaeda fighters sheltering in Waziristan, Mr. Rehman subscribed to the relatively moderate Deobandi school of thought, and was linked to the Haqqani Network, which focuses on attacks across the border in Afghanistan.
Inside the Taliban, Mr. Rehman was seen as a conciliatory figure, who helped mediate disputes with other militant factions, and who was opposed to the indiscriminate attacks on civilians that have become the Taliban hallmark in recent years.
“Wali was always at the forefront whenever a dispute emerged with Hafiz Gul Bahadur, the Haqqanis or Mullah Nazeer,” said one Taliban commander, referring to the leaders of Taliban-linked militant factions in Waziristan, speaking on the condition of anonymity. Inside the movement, the militant added, “his weapon was diplomacy.”
Mr. Rehman also had ties with several religious parties, some of which had offered to mediate with the Taliban. Mualana Syed Yusuf Shah, the deputy leader of one of those parties, said Mr. Rehman’s death would make it harder to negotiate peace.
“Everything has been overturned,” Mr. Shah said. “Now the Taliban will avenge his killing, resulting in more bloodshed and violence across the country.”
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