US targets Taliban leader responsible for CIA attack

NY Times:

At least 10 people were killed in an American drone attack in northwest Pakistan on Thursday morning, Pakistani security officials said.
The leader of the Pakistani Taliban, which took credit for the suicide attack that killed eight people at a C.I.A. base in Afghanistan late last month, was one of the targets, Pakistani officials said. A Taliban spokesman, however, denied that the leader, Hakimullah Mehsud, was among the casualties.

Several Pakistani security officials said there was no word on the Taliban leader. “The important thing for us is whether Hakimullah is among those killed,” said a Pakistani official in South Waziristan. A Pakistani intelligence official added that he believed Mr. Mehsud was “definitely targeted” on Thursday.

American officials have been trying to kill Mr. Mehsud with drone strikes, but there was no immediate confirmation from American authorities that he had been the target of this attack, which struck a compound in a remote region near the border of the South Waziristan and North Waziristan tribal areas about 7 a.m. on Thursday. A United States intelligence official said he could not confirm that Mr. Mehsud had been killed.

This guy has been dodging Hellfire missiles for some time. He escaped an attack in April last year and I think there have been more recent attempts. He is certainly someone deserving of the attention. The video of the CIA bomber shows him in the background. Before the video, it was believed the Haqqani network was responsible for the CIA attack, but it seems pretty clear that the Mehsud tribe and their leader were behind it. This raises some interesting questions about the previous intelligence the double agent was providing. Was he feeding the CIA information to attack the Haqqanis?