Word: qaeda
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...five missiles at a suspected militant compound near the border with Afghanistan. The compound belonged to Jalaluddin Haqqani, one of the most notorious Afghan Taliban commanders based in Pakistan and a Soviet-era ally of the CIA. The Predator strike missed Haqqani, but it did kill four midlevel al-Qaeda operatives, government and militant sources told the Associated Press. It also killed as many as eight children, one of Haqqani's wives and a sister...
...intelligence community believes that al-Qaeda has regrouped in Pakistan's ungoverned tribal territories abutting Afghanistan and that this area now serves as a staging ground for the movement's activities not only in Afghanistan but worldwide. The billions of dollars the U.S. has pumped into training and equipping the Pakistani military appears to have produced neither a capability nor a will to decisively tackle the problem. Many in Washington even suspect that members of Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence spy agency are actively supporting Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders and may be tipping them off about planned attacks...
...Predator attacks in Pakistan are hardly new. The first high-profile strike took place in January 2006, targeting al-Qaeda's deputy leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in the South Waziristan village of Damadola. The missile missed al-Zawahiri but killed dozens of villagers, unleashing violent protests across the country...
...after negotiations on the issue between the U.S. and Pervez Musharraf. The U.S. also stopped warning the Pakistani military about attacks ahead of time, as had been customary, since too many militants, it seemed, knew what was coming. The stepped-up strikes began yielding more results. In January, al-Qaeda commander Abu Laith al-Libi was killed, along with a dozen purported militants. But a May attack in Damadola, said to be targeting Algerian al-Qaeda operative Abu Sulaymen Jazairi, killed more civilians, while a July strike in South Waziristan killed leading al-Qaeda bomb expert Abu Khabab al-Masri...
...better job of avoiding civilian casualties, while the Pakistani leadership - if it is to avoid becoming the target of a backlash - needs to question whether its best interests are served by being seen to impotently condemn every U.S. air strike aimed at a militant of al-Qaeda, rather than by seeking to convince its public that the targets of these raids are also enemies of Pakistan...