Mulla Omar, Pervez Musharraf, Osama and USA .... Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistani Army chief who seized power in 1999 and tried to coax the Taliban toward moderation, found Omar to be a frustrating ally. “How do you negotiate with such a man?” Musharraf wrote later in a memoir. “He was (and still is) caught in a time warp, detached from reality.” Omar’s former colleagues describe him as a good listener who rarely interrupted others during meetings, but when Prince Turki al-Faisal, then Saudi Arabia’s intelligence chief, flew to Kandahar to plead with Omar to turn in bin Laden, the Taliban leader “stalked out in fury,” according to Musharraf’s version of the story; variations of the meeting have been recounted by others. The Amir came back “a few minutes later, his hair dripping with water, his shirt and sleeves drenched.” Omar declared, “I went into the other room and poured cold water on my head to cool off. If you had not been my guest I would have done something dire to you.” Negotiating with the Amir, Musharraf recalled, was “like banging one’s head against a wall.” They interviewed a senior Taliban leader who said, referring to bin Laden, “The Taliban advised him that he should not misuse Afghan soil and that he should control himself; it would make Mullah Mohammad Omar upset. . . . But he’d go ahead and do it anyway and then come and promise not to do it again. But then it would happen another time. Keeping bin Laden was, for the Taliban, like tending to a fire.” After 9/11, the United States announced its intention to destroy the Taliban government if Omar did not turn bin Laden over to America. “I told him America would definitely attack,” Zaeef recalled. But, in the Amir’s assessment, “there was less than a ten-per-cent chance that America would resort to anything beyond threats.” When it became clear that he was wrong, Omar told his colleagues, according to a former Taliban leader, “You just care about your posts and your money, your ministries, but I don’t care about mine. My position is bigger than yours, but I don’t care about it. . . . I am ready to lose my leadership, but not to hand over Osama to the Americans or send him to another country.”Mullah Mohammad Omar, the leader of the Taliban, in the late nineteen-nineties. He lost an eye while fighting the Soviets. Mullah Mohammad Omar, the leader of the Taliban, in the late nineteen-nineties. He lost an eye while fighting the Soviets. Gradually, it became clear that they weren’t. Afghanistan’s intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security, placed agents inside Taliban-exile circles in Pakistan; their reports, as well as intelligence collected directly by the United States, showed that, by 2004, Omar had reorganized the Taliban’s military and political command from inside Pakistan. Omar prepared annual strategy documents to map his plans for a revived insurgency and to communicate those plans to followers. By 2006, aggressive Taliban units had infiltrated Kandahar and Helmand. There was increasing evidence that Omar was back in active command, with I.S.I. support. Afghanistan’s intelligence service reported to the United States that, around 2005 or 2006, Omar had received “up to thirty million dollars from Pakistan” to fund the Taliban’s refurbishment and recruitment of fighters, according to a former official who read the reporting. “Mullah Omar was given money so that people could see him in charge again,” the former official recalled. “Omar is not Khomeini. Mullah Omar is not Che Guevara. . . . For Mullah Omar to be valid, to be relevant,” he needed to be able to fund the Taliban’s payroll. According to research by Giustozzi, the Taliban may also have reactivated private donor networks of sympathetic businessmen and religious charities in the Persian Gulf. In 2007, Vice-President Dick Cheney visited Pakistan and pressured Musharraf’s government to crack down on the Taliban. During the trip, security forces arrested Mullah Obaidullah, a close adviser to Omar who had served as the Islamic Emirate’s defense minister. Obaidullah “had a location document” with an address listing his house number and city district in Quetta, another former official said. “He’d obviously been issued that by the I.S.I. or the Army” as a form of identification. Around this time, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice asked David Kilcullen, an Australian specialist in counterinsurgency, to assess the Taliban’s resurgence. Kilcullen initially assumed that the Afghan intelligence reports that the I.S.I. was “running the war” were just “a convenient excuse,” he said, to deflect attention from the mounting problems within Karzai’s government, such as widespread corruption and weak administration. Kilcullen came to conclude that Pakistan was “actually on the other side” of the war in Afghanistan, but he found this was “an extremely unpopular point of view” inside the Bush Administration, which remained committed to counterterrorism and strategic military partnership with Pakistan’s security services. When Kilcullen offered his opinion at one interagency meeting, “people laughed at me,” he recalled. Pervez Musharraf denied adamantly that Pakistan had anything to do with the Taliban’s revitalization. The I.S.I. is a “disciplined service staffed by seasoned military officers who follow my orders,” Musharraf told Nancy Pelosi, then the Speaker of the House, early in 2007, according to a cable published by WikiLeaks. The accusation that the I.S.I. was sheltering Mullah Omar was inaccurate, Musharraf added. “I do not believe Omar has ever been to Pakistan,” he said. en President Obama ordered more troops to be deployed in Afghanistan, his advisers analyzed Mullah Omar’s role in the war. On a Saturday in February of 2010, I met Richard Holbrooke for lunch at Washington’s Four Seasons Hotel. I asked him about the Taliban’s leadership. “I think Mullah Omar is incredibly important,” Holbrooke replied. “The more I look at this thing, the more I think he is a driving, inspirational force whose capture or elimination would have a material effect.” I asked if he believed he could negotiate a viable peace agreement with Omar. “I don’t think we can negotiate with Mullah Omar, personally,” he said. “That’s why I think eliminating Mullah Omar is so critical. Right now, if you could choose between Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden, I personally would lean toward Mullah Omar.” Holbrooke died ten months later. Last spring, the Obama Administration located and killed Osama bin Laden at a compound near Pakistan’s leading military academy, in the town of Abbottabad. The circumstances in which bin Laden was found suggest that he might have enjoyed support from elements of the Pakistani security services, although no proof of this has surfaced.Yet, at the same time, the Administration is urging Pakistan to propose a system of safe passage and security guarantees under which other senior Taliban leaders presumed to be living in Pakistan might travel to the proposed new Taliban political office in Qatar. Under such a system of safe passage, the Afghan government would recommend specific individuals for special treatment; the United States would agree not to target them as enemy commanders. Another concern is how the Taliban leaders’ families would be given guarantees of protection from Pakistani retaliation if the leaders took negotiating positions that Pakistan did not like. The families of Taliban leaders living in Pakistan depend on its government for security, travel documents, access to schools, and licenses to run businesses. Taliban leaders do not want to negotiate with the United States and the Karzai government in circumstances where Pakistan might use these dependencies to coerce their decision-making. Kayani, for his part, has told his American counterparts that he is confused about whether the Obama Administration wants Mullah Omar alive or dead. One former Administration official said that, among President Obama’s advisers, “there just wasn’t agreement about the answer.” Steve Coll..
Posted on: Thu, 01 Jan 2015 19:11:23 +0000
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