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.