The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches from a Precarious State

by Declan Walsh

David Coleman Headley, an American-born jihadi, marvelled in an email in 2009. ‘Any Waziri or Mehsud I spoke to seemed grateful to God for the privilege of being able to host the “Foreign Mujahideen”.’ Headley had participated in the terrorist assault on Mumbai a year earlier, in which 163 people were killed, and was plotting an attack on a Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten. Other foreigners planned mayhem in Madrid, London, Amsterdam and New York. Waziristan had become the cockpit of global jihad. ‘It’s like an Elvis fan coming to Graceland,’ a British diplomat in Islamabad told me of the influx. ‘It confirms you.’ The Americans, alarmed at Pakistan’s loss of control, took matters into their own hands. The CIA dramatically ramped up its campaign of drone strikes in the tribal belt, hitting at least fifty-four targets in 2009, and then 118 in 2010. For President Barack Obama and Washington lawmakers, the drone strikes had an antiseptic appeal, decimating the top al Qaeda ranks while posing little danger to American life. But they also killed hundreds of innocent civilians – the exact numbers were hard to know – and fed into a groundswell of anti-American sentiment across Pakistan.