Drone strike reportedly kills a long-sought target in Pakistan

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — For three long years, the CIA hunted the Pakistani militant who had helped send a suicide bomber deep into a U.S. base in eastern Afghanistan. The audacious mission killed seven U.S. intelligence officers and contractors, one of the deadliest days in agency history.

Early Wednesday, the CIA apparently sought at least partial payback. Drone aircraft fired four missiles into a mud-walled compound in Pakistan’s tribal area while the suspect was supposedly asleep.

Pakistani security officials said the missiles killed Waliur Rehman, the Pakistani Taliban’s second-in-command who allegedly played a major role in launching cross-border attacks on U.S. military forces inside Afghanistan, as well as in the suicide bombing inside the CIA base in Khowst on Dec. 30, 2009.

The 3 a.m. missile strike was the first since President Obama declared May. 23 that America had turned a corner in the war against Al Qaeda and its affiliates, and announced new restrictions on targeted killings by drones.

The CIA has conducted more than 300 drone strikes in Pakistan since 2009, but Obama said he would impose a new, stricter standard of who could be targeted in the future. Outside war zones, the U.S. will use lethal force “only against a target that poses a continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons,” the White House said. Previously, administration officials had said targeted killings could be authorized against a “significant threat to U.S. interests,” a broader standard.

U.S. officials declined to say Wednesday whether Rehman posed an imminent threat to Americans.

White House aides said the president hopes to phase out the covert drone war in Pakistan by the end of 2014, when U.S. troops are withdrawn from Afghanistan.

Partly because the CIA strikes are classified, administration officials provided few details Wednesday and said they still could not confirm Rehman’s death. But White House spokesman Jay Carney said Rehman has participated in operations targeting U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces in Afghanistan and was responsible for “horrific attacks” against Pakistani soldiers and civilians.

“While I am not in a position to confirm the reports of his death, it’s important to note who this individual is,” Carney said. Obama’s promise in his speech to provide greater transparency “does not mean that we would be able to discuss the details of every counter-terrorism operation,” he added.

Few Pakistanis would mourn Rehman’s death, but the latest drone strike could complicate U.S. relations with Pakistan’s prime minister-elect, Nawaz Sharif, who has sharply criticized the CIA campaign. Sharif is due to be sworn in next week.

Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry expressed “serious concerns” over the latest attack.

“The government of Pakistan has consistently maintained that drone strikes are counterproductive, entail loss of innocent civilian lives, have human rights and humanitarian implications and violate the principles of national sovereignty, territorial integrity and international law,” the ministry said in a statement.

The missile strike occurred in North Waziristan, a tribal region that has provided safe haven for a wide array of jihadist groups, including the Pakistani Taliban, Al Qaeda, and the Haqqani network, an Afghan Taliban wing that has launched some of the deadliest attacks on U.S. and Afghan forces in Kabul and much of eastern Afghanistan.

Rehman, believed to be in his 40s, was visiting a tribesman in Miram Shah when the missiles hit, according to Pakistani security officials who requested anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the incident.

Rehman and several other Taliban commanders were sleeping in a guesthouse at the compound. At least five other militants also were killed, the officials said.

One security official said he was “90% sure” that Rehman was among the dead. A spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban, Ehsanullah Ehsan, said he could not confirm Rehman’s death. The militant leader had been thought dead after at least two previous drone strikes.

The Pakistani Taliban is separate from the Taliban in Afghanistan. It has fought for years to topple the elected government in Islamabad, which it views as subservient to America. Thousands of people have been killed in suicide bombings and other assaults on military bases, police checkpoints, mosques and markets.

The U.S. government believes Rehman and the Pakistani Taliban leader, Hakimullah Mahsud, helped organize the 2009 suicide bombing at the CIA outpost inside Forward Operating Base Chapman, a military base in eastern Afghanistan. The blast also killed a senior Jordanian intelligence official and an Afghan driver, as well as the bomber. Eight other CIA employees were wounded.

CIA officials later admitted they had fallen for a ruse. A Jordanian doctor who had promised to lead the CIA to Ayman Zawahiri and other top Al Qaeda leaders was allowed to enter the heavily guarded base without being searched.

The doctor, who was still secretly loyal to Al Qaeda, detonated a bomb hidden under his clothes as the CIA team waited to greet him with a cake, an incident portrayed in the recent Hollywood film “Zero Dark Thirty.”

U.S. officials say the Pakistani Taliban also helped train Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistan-born U.S. citizen who tried to detonate a car bomb in New York’s Times Square in 2010. The huge bomb failed to explode, and Shahzad was captured, convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

The State Department said in 2010 that the Pakistani Taliban “continues to plan and carry out attacks against the interests of the United States,” and previous drone strikes are believed to have targeted some in the group. The U.S. offered $5 million rewards for information leading to Rehman and Mahsud.

Mahmood Shah, a retired Pakistani brigadier, said Rehman’s death could cause a rift in the Pakistani Taliban, a loose collection of armed factions that owe allegiance to their own commanders. Rehman had assembled his own group of fighters, and Shah said they “may no longer stay very active in the command of Hakimullah Mahsud.”

U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan have declined for several years in Pakistan. Former U.S. intelligence officials say that civilian casualties had become a recruiting tool for terrorists, and that drone operators were running out of viable targets.

Including Wednesday’s attack, the CIA has launched 14 drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas this year. That compares with 46 last year, 64 in 2011 and 117 in 2010, according to the Long War Journal, a website that uses media reports to track the strikes.

alex.rodriguez@latimes.com

shashank.bengali@latimes.com

Times staff writers Rodriguez reported from Islamabad and Bengali from Washington. Special correspondent Zulfiqar Ali reported from Peshawar, Pakistan. Special correspondent Nasir Khan in Islamabad contributed to this report.