Updated on
Summary White Houses top adviser says taking out 3 to 5 key Qaeda leaders could give knockout punch.
Speaking at the Aspen Security Forum, retired Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, who is security adviser on Afghanistan and Pakistan, said the drones in Pakistan were increased after Osma bin Laden’s killing. He said now is the time to keep up US counterterrorist actions in Pakistan, even if they upset the Pakistani government.Lute said killing al Qaeda successor Ayman al-Zawahri and four of his lieutenants in the next six months could ”significantly jeopardize al Qaeda’s capacity to regenerate.”Lute said this in response to former U.S. intelligence chief Dennis Blair who has said U.S. should stop drone campaign in Pakistan. He said U.S. should reconsider the $80 billion a year it spends to fight terrorism.Speaking at the Aspen Security Forum, Blair said the CIAs unmanned aircraft operation aimed at al-Qaida is backfiring by damaging the U.S.-Pakistan relationship. The former director of national intelligence suggests giving Pakistan more say in what gets hit by drone strikes and when, despite Pakistans record of tipping off militants when it gets advance word of U.S. action.Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who previously headed the CIA, has lauded the drone campaign as a key tool to take out al-Qaida and other militants in Pakistans tribal areas. Strikes, which have more than tripled year-to-year under the Obama administration, are done with tacit Pakistani assent, though publicly, Pakistani officials decry the hits.That tension has grown worse after the U.S. unilateral raid into Pakistan May 2 to kill al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, and an earlier incident in January, when a CIA contractor was held for killing two Pakistani men in Lahore that he said were trying to rob him.Stephen Hadley, former national security adviser to President George W. Bush, said the Pakistani government in the past had assented to the strikes, if they were used against major targets.The line they drew ... was boots on the ground, special (operations) forces in Pakistan, Hadley said. We did a limited cross-border operation and it caused a huge outcry to the point where we said were not going to do that anymore unless it was to get bin Laden or his then-deputy Ayman al-Zawahri, knowing youre going to pay in Pakistan public opinion. And we did after bin Laden was killed.
