The twenty-five in Pakistan is a figure John Kiriakou heard delivered in a hearing room and has used since as his shortest argument about the length of the war. He was then on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which had Robert Grenier and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff before it in the spring of 2009.[1]
The question came from Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, and Kiriakou stresses its plainness: “she said — and this was in the spring of 2009 — how many members of al-Qaeda are in Pakistan? Easy question, direct question. The answer was 25.”[2]
“So by 2009, there were 25 members of al-Qaeda in Pakistan. We set out to destroy al-Qaeda in October of 2001. And man, they were destroyed. So what were we still doing there?”
His answer to his own question is that a different war was beginning at the moment the first one ended: “what we were doing there was the dawn of the Pakistani terror war. That was when Obama and the CIA were just starting the drone war there. Just starting. We hadn’t even had yet debates over refueling the drones in Baluchistan that became so controversial.”[3]
The fight that followed was, on his account, with people the United States had never had a quarrel with: “we decided that we were going to pick a fight, essentially, with the Taliban, with which we had never had a beef.”[3]