The leader of the Afghan Taliban, Mullah Mohammad Omar, is dead and the Taliban as we have known them are history. Mullah Omar may have launched his bid for power in Kandahar but his career and myth were conceived, and finally shattered, east of the Durand Line. The Afghan Presidency stated in an official press release last week that Mullah Omar died in April 2013 in Karachi. The gravity of the charge inherent in the statement has perhaps not sunk in yet in Pakistan. The Pakistani officials seem to be playing dead. Not a word has been heard from them about the passing of their most allied ally and, more importantly, what exactly he was doing in Karachi and before that in Quetta as is widely believed. The Afghans, especially former President Hamid Karzai and his national security team, stand vindicated. Mr Karzai and his intelligence chief Mr Amrullah Saleh, were spot on in saying it out loud, over a decade ago, that both Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar had sanctuaries in Pakistan. But the Pakistani leadership at the time, specifically the military dictator General Pervez Musharraf and his successors, disparaged the Afghan leaders ad nauseam. General Musharraf, while at the helm, tried to send the world on a wild goose chase by stating in interview after interview that neither bin Laden nor Mullah Omar were in Pakistan.
It cannot, however, just end with a tactical silence. Mullah Omar led one of the most ruthless regimes of the late 20th century, which massacred thousands of Afghans and brutalised many more. Making a spectacle out of hanging political and military opponents from lampposts and tank barrels and shooting women in football stadiums, with the Taliban hordes jeering was the order of the day since the inception of Mullah Omar’s rule. He hosted the most vicious jihadist terrorists around the world that culminated in the 9/11 terror attacks.
All this while, Mullah Omar was propped up from the outside, with even his Kandahar and Jalalabad telephones being run from the Quetta and Peshawar exchanges respectively. The first Taliban cabinet included at least 12 ministers who had been educated at Pakistan’s Haqqaniah seminary, including the founder of the eponymous terrorist network Jalaluddin Haqqani, who too has now been reported to have died a year ago. And when the international reprisal for the heinous attacks on the mainland US came in the winter of 2001, he fled to Quetta. It did not just end with an asylum there; he was facilitated to regroup and then unleash a horrific terrorist insurgency in Afghanistan yet again. For 21 years the outsiders sustained Mullah Omar — in life and in death — and inflicted massive misery on a whole generation of Afghans. Mullah Omar’s death closed a unified Taliban insurgency but opens up a Pandora’s Box of questions about his patrons and whether any responsibility will be taken, now that Pakistan’s civil and military leadership claim that they have corrected their course against jihadism.
Responsibility has to be affixed, not just for the sake of the Afghans but also for the thousands of Pakistani victims of Mullah Omar’s cohorts. The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) owed allegiance to Mullah Omar, the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) ran terrorist training camps in Afghanistan during his reign and the al Qaeda leadership was the apple of his eye. These outfits shared ideology, manpower and logistics with Mullah Omar’s Taliban. They gained battlefield experience with the Taliban only to boomerang back to Pakistan, causing great death and destruction. The LeJ founder Riaz Basra was Mullah Omar’s guest in Afghanistan and dozens of his lieutenants, including the recently killed sectarian terrorist Malik Ishaq, consorted with the Taliban. From massacres of the Shias, Ahmadis and Christians to attacks on the Sri Lankan cricket team and indeed on the army’s General Headquarters itself, the vipers raised in the jihadist pit, designed to execute a proxy war in Afghanistan, have consistently come back to bite us. The cost-benefit analysis that the elements of the Pakistani security establishment have in their minds might never be known. Perhaps no one will ever be held accountable for turning on its head the proclamation by Mr Muhammad Ali Jinnah that, “Our object should be peace within, and peace without. We want to live peacefully and maintain cordial friendly relations with our immediate neighbours and with the world at large.”
The appointment of Haqqani seminary alumni Mullah Muhammad Akhtar Mansoor and Sirajuddin Haqqani as the Taliban’s new leader and deputy leader respectively, reportedly in a Taliban Shura meeting in Quetta, indicates that Pakistan’s much-trumpeted course correction may still be a red herring. What is clear though is that both the Taliban and their patrons have run out of options in Afghanistan. The Taliban did confirm their leader’s death with the spin that he died in his native village of Chah-e-Himmat in Kandahar but even they know that their façade of being an indigenous Afghan movement has been flayed permanently. An overwhelming majority of Afghans despise the Taliban. Mullah Omar’s death in Pakistan has only cemented that feeling. The halo of leadership and even spirituality around the one-eyed, reticent, reclusive and, by most accounts, dumb as a rock Mullah Omar was artificially foisted in his life but has been busted by his death.
The Taliban’s political office in Qatar, which is led by Tayyab Agha and seems to control their website, is at loggerheads with Pakistan. Agha has reportedly resigned due to differences with Mullah Mansoor. The field commanders like Mullah Abdul Qayyum Zakir, who for now has pledged allegiance to Mullah Mansoor, may break away from him sooner rather than later. Sirajuddin Haqqani has been running his terror network for half a decade since his father semiretired in 2010, as I had noted in a previous column. Not much changes for the Haqqanis, for better or for worse. They are not a political outfit and cannot become one. The Taliban may persist militarily for some time, but their political prospects to gain a berth as one entity in the Kabul government are over and done with. The Afghans in general and Dr Ashraf Ghani’s government in particular have a once in a lifetime opportunity to seize the initiative. Now is the time to get their political, military and diplomatic ducks in a row and seal this rare deal. If the Afghans cannot capitalise on the geopolitical windfall from Mullah Omar’s demise, they may be in for another 21 years of agony of the kind that had started with his rise.
The writer can be reached at [email protected] and he tweets @mazdaki