It is hard to say how many people would have mourned Ayman al-Zawahiri if he had indeed been killed on Friday by the US missiles that hit a Pashtun area near Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan. That was apparently the intention of CIA officers when they dispatched a remotely piloted Predator aircraft to execute the deadly hi-tech mission. The Egyptian-born paediatrician is increasingly seen as the brains of al-Qaida amid doubts as to whether Osama bin Laden is still alive. That Zawahiri, like Bin Laden, has a $25m bounty on his head attests to his status as a “high-value target”.The incident shows, not for the first time since 9/11, that intelligence is a dangerously imprecise business. Zawahiri was believed to be coming to dinner in a mud-brick house in Damadola village. Yet at least 17 dead, including women and children, were found in the rubble.The death toll is a grim reminder of the fact that, legal and moral considerations aside, operations of this kind — like the “targeted assassinations” carried out by Israel against its Palestinian enemies — are rarely cost-free. The “collateral damage” of killing innocent people risks recruiting others to the jihadi cause, not least in the teeming madrassas that are so often identified as breeding grounds for extremism.There is also the danger of destabilising the regime of General Pervez Musharraf, who used to have a cosy relationship with the Taliban next door but who has reaped huge rewards from backing the US as a “frontline” ally — including F16 fighters and indulgence of his acquisition of nuclear weapons and of the smuggling network run by AQ Khan. The president warns his countrymen against harbouring “foreign militants”, but Islamist parties, which form the main parliamentary opposition and govern two provinces on the Afghan border, accuse him of being too willing to accommodate the US.The Bush administration does not take kindly to advice from others as to how to conduct itself. But it is surely worth pondering if it is a job well done when the quarry escapes, innocents die and thousands of Muslims gather in Karachi, Islamabad and Peshawar to chant “Death to America”.Excerpted from a leader in ‘The Guardian’, January 16
