Consider it the capstone to CIA Director Leon Panetta’s command of the drone war: the CIA’s drones are on their way to Yemen.

What started in Pakistan’s tribal areas will now patrol the increasingly ungoverned spaces inside Yemen, hunting al-Qaida terrorists. The drone war resumed after nearly nine years of hiatus on May 5, when missiles fired by unmanned planes sought two brothers in central Yemen thought to be al-Qaida operatives.

Only those drones were flown by the elite Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), not the CIA. Now the agency will work alongside JSOC to export its Pakistan experience conducting widespread drone strikes into a second country. Phase one, already underway, is to use the drones’ surveillance functions to collect intel for JSOC. Once it has a sufficient lay of the land, it’ll begin its own targeting killing program, the Wall Street Journal reports, with help from Saudi Arabia’s “extensive network of on-the-ground informants.”

Panetta essentially forecasted the expansion of the drone war during his Thursday confirmation hearing to become the next defense secretary. He told senators he would “keep the pressure up” on al-Qaida’s Yemeni franchise — despite U.S.-Yemeni counterterrorism cooperation stalling during Yemen’s incipient revolution. And ever since al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula tried to mail bombs to the U.S., plans have been afoot to send joint CIA-JSOC “hunter-killer” teams on a Yemeni manhunt.

The government of Ali Abdullah Saleh has long given the U.S. carte blanche to conduct counterterrorism strikes, as long as the U.S. lined his pockets and allowed him plausible deniability. But Saleh is recovering in Saudi Arabia from wounds suffered during an apparent rocket attack and his rule may be done. Yemen is in chaos right now.

The CIA program is intended to mitigate the effects of a weak or anti-American government but it could easily fuel Yemen’s political fire. In Pakistan, the drones added kindling to a widespread anti-U.S. sentiment, as they’re viewed as a violation of sovereignty that leads to civilian deaths. “Pattern of life” intelligence is supposed to build the targeting data for the drone war, but that worries Yemen expert Gregory Johnsen of Princeton University. “In #Yemen just because it looks like AQ [al-Qaida], walks like AQ and talks like AQ doesn’t necessarily mean it is AQ,” he tweets.

Even if U.S. experts are wrong and a post-Saleh government doesn’t allow the U.S. to conduct drone strikes from its airbases, the Saudi connection raises the intriguing possibility that the Saudis could host the remotely piloted planes.

So that’s at least five countries where military or CIA drones conduct or have conducted counterterrorism strikes: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen and Libya. Panetta told the Senate panel he feared a rise of al-Qaida in Somalia and “north Africa,” too. Will they be the next theaters of robot war?

Photo: U.S. Air Force