Thursday, June 25, 2015

The Inside Story On America's First Drone Strike

The Predator in 1998 (Reuters / Jeffrey S. Viano-U.S. Navy)

Chris Wood, The Atlantic: The Story of America's Very First Drone Strike

The CIA’s then-secret weapon missed Taliban leader Mullah Omar, starting a bureaucratic fight that has lasted 14 years.

“Who the fuck did that?” The words greeting the first-ever combat strike by a remotely piloted aircraft were uttered not in praise but in anger. A botched Hellfire-missile attack by a CIA Predator had just cost the United States a likely chance to kill Taliban Supreme Commander Mullah Mohammed Omar. In response, the U.S. Air Force general in charge of airstrikes in Afghanistan was about to threaten to call off the entire opening campaign of the War on Terror, unless he was given control of the CIA’s secret weapon.

It was the night of October 7, 2001, less than a month after 9/11, and from the United States’ new Combined Air Operations Center (CAOC) in Saudi Arabia, it was the job of Lieutenant General Chuck Wald and his deputy Dave Deptula to coordinate every aspect of the unfolding Afghan air war. Operation Enduring Freedom—the campaign to rid Afghanistan of al-Qaeda and its Taliban hosts—was the first offensive of a global conflict that would eventually consume many tens of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars, and see more than two and a half million U.S. personnel sent into battle.

WNU Editor: This is the first time that I mam reading on the "how and why" the U.S. missed the chance to kill Taliban Supreme Commander Mullah Mohammed Omar at the beginning of the Afghan war. That alone is worth the read because if they did kill him and his top lieutenants, I suspect that this ongoing conflict would not be where it is today.

1 comment:

B.Poster said...

You are probably right that the conflict would not be where it is today had Mullah Omar and his top aides been killed. Since he and his top aides were not killed, there is no way to know precisely where it would be had these men been killed.

There would seem to be no question that others would have stepped forward to take his place. How competent would they have been? I think more likely than not they would have been as competent as these men were. There is even a chance they'd be more competent which means we would be worse off today had they been killed than we are with them not being killed.

In any event, the conflict would have unfolded differently with different leadership so it technically true to say the conflict "would not be where it is today." As to would America be better off, probably not.