The announcement of the death of Mullah Omar, the reclusive leader of the Taliban, is a potential game-changer in the on-going peace negotiations between the Afghanistan government and the Taliban. The office of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani issued a press release on July 29, just days before a second round of parlays between Kabul and the Taliban were scheduled to be held in the Pakistani resort town of Murree, confirming that Omar had died in April 2013 in Pakistan.
The announcement of Omar’s death itself raises several questions. What was the source of information that led to the Afghan government’s press release? Was it the Pakistanis who informed the Afghan government of Omar’s death, as Amrullah Saleh, former chief of Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security (NDS) believes?
This certainly is one possibility. Pakistan has steadfastly refuted what is effectively the worst-kept secret of the fifteen-year war by claiming that Omar was in hiding in Afghanistan and was not in fact living in Quetta, the capital of Pakistan’s Balochistan province. It would have been odd, then, for them to confirm the death of someone they claim wasn’t even living in their country.
Was the timing of the announcement meant to coincide with the second round of talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban and their sponsors, the Pakistani Army? If so, does one surmise that President Ghani has finally shown his hand and turned the tables on the Taliban and their Pakistani interlocutors, thereby neutralizing any leverage they perceived to have had during the negotiations?
While many of these questions remain unanswered for the time being, the announcement of Mullah Omar’s death will exacerbate tensions among competing factions within the Taliban and could potentially deteriorate into fratricidal war in Afghanistan.
Unquestioned loyalty to Mullah Omar was the central, unifying force to the Taliban since they first began consolidating power in Kandahar in 1996. As Michael Semple notes in his excellent piece in Politico, Mullah Omar was not just the leader of the Taliban; to them, he was Amir al-Momineen – Commander of the Faithful – whose veneration was derived at least partly from the belief that he wore a cloak that belonged to the Prophet Mohammed himself.
A day after the announcement of Mullah Omar’s death, the Quetta Shura, the high council of Taliban leadership, appointed Mullah Akhtar Mansour as their new leader. Like Omar, Mansour draws political support from Kandahar and is a product of the infamous Darul Uloom Haqqania madrasa, whose alumni includes the likes of Jalaluddin Haqqani, the founder of the Haqqani Network.
Mansour is widely reported to be in favor of political negotiations with Kabul. He is described as a “moderate,” by some news media outlets, although just what that means in the context of an organization that unleashed untold brutality on the Afghans is not immediately clear. He is sanctioned by the United Nations Security Council on charges of drug trafficking and was deputy to Mullah Baradar before Baradar (who opposed negotiations with Kabul) was “removed” from the scene by the Pakistanis.
Mullah Mansour is the ISI’s golden boy. Indeed, news that his second-in-command will be Sirajuddin Haqqani, the chief of the Haqqani Network, a group U.S. officials have described as a “veritable arm” of the ISI, is not surprising. Through the proxies of Mansour and Haqqani, the ISI hopes to install an order of its choosing in Afghanistan and circumscribe Indian influence and involvement.
Indeed, Mansour and Haqqani’s anti-India credentials are well known. Mullah Mansour was the Minister of Civil Aviation in the Taliban-led government in Afghanistan when Indian Airlines flight 814 was hijacked to Kandahar in 1999. Through the U.S., the CBI attempted to gain access to Mullah Mansour in 2003 in order to interrogate him over IC-814’s hijacking, but the CBI’s request was not granted.
The Haqqani network, of course, was responsible for the 2008 bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul, which resulted in the deaths of 58 civilians and diplomats. Together with the ISI’s other anti-India proxies, the Gulbuddin Hekmatyar group and Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Haqqani Network forms the Kabul Attack Network, which was responsible for a number of attacks in the Afghan capital, including an attempted assassination of then-President Hamid Karzai.
But Mullah Mansour’s accession has not gone unchallenged. Mullah Omar’s son, Mohammad Yaqoob believes he is the rightful heir to the title Amir al-Moumineen. Yaqoob reportedly stormed out the Quetta Shura meeting that endorsed Mullah Mansour. Other senior Taliban leaders, including Abdul Qayoom Zakir (Taliban military chief, allied with Yaqoob), Mullah Habibullah (a member of the Quetta Shura) and Sayed Tayib Agha (chief of the Taliban’s Political Office in Doha, Qatar) are reportedly against Mansour’s appointment.
Even as there is uncertainty over the Taliban’s future, old alliances are re-emerging to challenge the insurgency in Afghanistan. The old veterans, Gen. Dostum, Salahuddin Rabbani, Attah Mohammad Noor and Ustad Mohaqiq, whose groups formed the Russia, India and Iran-backed Northern Alliance, renewed vows for joint military action against insurgents in northern Afghanistan.
The pieces in the Afghan puzzle are moving quickly. India cannot afford for Afghanistan to relapse into the Pakistan-dominated terror sanctuary that it once was. It is true that the Taliban was once a proxy of the ISI and thus anti-India. But the Taliban today is no longer a monolith and such logic no longer holds water. It is therefore crucial that India engage all actors including factions and leaders of the Taliban to ensure that its interests in that country are protected.
Rohan Joshi is a Fellow at the Takshashila Institution, focusing on Indian foreign policy and strategic affairs. He is a regular contributor to Pragati - The Indian National Interest Review and The Diplomat.
This is Rohan's first post on his blog, Bharat Kshetra, a part of Business Standard's collaborative platform, Punditry.
Rohan tweets as @filter_c
Rohan Joshi is a Fellow at the Takshashila Institution, focusing on Indian foreign policy and strategic affairs. He is a regular contributor to Pragati - The Indian National Interest Review and The Diplomat.
This is Rohan's first post on his blog, Bharat Kshetra, a part of Business Standard's collaborative platform, Punditry.
Rohan tweets as @filter_c