Splits develop within the Taliban leadership

Anand Gopal, who is Bernard L Schwartz fellow at the New America Foundation, has written an interesting article on splits within the Afghan Taliban. Based largely on interviews with Taliban figures in the UAE and with others interviewed via telephone or skype calls in Pakistan, the article, published by the Combating Terrorism Center suggests that the Taliban leadership is fracturing: "Certain commanders have been dismissed from the insurgents’ top brass, spats have erupted between leading figures, and a growing number of field commanders are contravening the orders of their superiors. In the process, a political struggle between blocs favoring and opposing talks with the United States has emerged."
Gopal says there are three reasons for the recent disagreements: the arrest and detention of Mullah Barodar by the Pakistanis; the US military strategy of killing mid-level Taliban leaders; and the initiation of peace talks by Washington.

Taliban defence minister "died in Karachi gaol"

The Taliban yesterday confirmed that its former defence minister during the Islamic Emirate had died nearly two years ago in a Pakistani prison. Their website says that he was detained on 3 January 2007 by the Pakistani government in Balochistan, but that little was heard from him after that. Only in the last few days did his family receive news from Pakistan that he died in prison in Karachi due to "heart complications" on 5 March 2010.
In a statement the Taliban says: "The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan considers the martyrdom of Shaheed Mullah Obaidullah Akhond a void for the entire Islamic Ummah and especially Afghanistan which cannot be compensated and vigorously demand from the Pakistani officials to give the complete and factual information of Al Haaj Mullah Obaidullah’s detention, illness and death to the Islamic Emirate. In this regard, we also hold the International Red Cross responsible as the news of the martyrdom of Al Haaj Mullah Obaidullah Akhond was received after a period of 2 years and also for not providing any type information about the concerned martyr and others to the families of these prisoners of Islamic Emirate who are held in Pakistan and we also demand that they fill this shortcoming in the future as it is their obligation."
It is clear from the statement that the Taliban itself was in ignorance of the fate of Mullah Obaidullah. He had recently been slated as a potential member of a negotiating team with the Karzai regime and his release by Pakistan was one of the preconditions the Taliban insisted upon before they would agree to negotiations. They are now demanding an inquiry into his death.
His death will come as a shock to many Taliban members. As one of the most senior Taliban figures and someone known to be very close to Mullah Omar, the intriguing question is whether or not Mullah Obaidullah was murdered under torture or died of natural causes in captivity. 
Was he seen by the Pakistanis as one of the old guard around Mullah Omar, whose outlook did not suit Pakistani interests any longer? Although he was one of those who began to reorganise the Taliban once it had fled into exile in Pakistan, it is possible that he favoured negotiations to end the conflict. He was close to Mullah Barodar, who was also arrested by the Pakistanis, some say because Barodar was also in favour of negotiations with the Karzai regime. If his death was natural why was it covered up by the Pakistanis for so long? Any more information would be appreciated.

Pakistan policy change opens up new possibilities

In the three weeks since the London conference on Afghanistan, events have moved at a breakneck pace. The joint offensive in Helmand, involving up to 15,000 soldiers, is now into its second week. In Pakistan, a whole raft of senior Taliban officials have been captured; in the badlands of North Waziristan drone strikes have continued apace, in the process killing a scion of the Haqqani clan, while it has also been revealed that in early January elements of the Taliban and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hezb-e-Islami met with Afghan government officials in the Maldives to discuss the possibility of peace.
Some, if not all, of these events may be related. What is beginning to emerge is that there is a possible consensus about a way forward through negotiations. The Western powers, the Afghan government, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, even Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah accept that it is possible to talk to the 'good' Taliban, providing the 'bad' Taliban - namely, those Talibs who continue to ally themselves with al-Qaeda and other Islamist fanatics - can be excluded.
The most important change - which should be seen as seismic in its importance - seems to be amongst the Pakistani military, which until now has been unremittingly opposed to a negotiated agreement between the Karzai government and the Taliban. From a Pakistani perspective, such an agreement threatened to bolster the position of India in Afghanistan, without leading to an agreement over Kashmir.
Pakistan's military and civilian leadership has always maintained (in private) that control over the mujahideen guaranteed it a place at the negotiating table over any final settlement in Afghanistan. If it was not happy, then the tribal fighters would be used to make Afghanistan ungovernable.
Several things have happened to make Pakistan rethink. The first and most important is that India was effectively isolated at the London conference. Despite having provided £1.2 billion in aid to Afghanistan, India's opposition to any talks with the Taliban was brushed aside. According to The Times of India: "The Afghanistan conference in London last week was a shocker for Indian mandarins who had hoped to muscle in and get a larger say in Afghan policy given the money and effort New Delhi has put into the reconstruction efforts. But what happened was that India got blindsided by the British swallowing the Pakistani line that Islamabad could deliver peace by negotiating with the Taliban." India continues to believe that a deal with the Taliban will mean a Taliban takeover in Kabul.
The second thing that happened is that the Pakistan military has realised that it can no longer protect its proteges in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, particularly in North and South Waziristan.
While it reluctantly agreed to launch the offensive in South Waziristan last October, it put little pressure on the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan and killed very few of its fighters. But that did not stop the Americans killing most of the TTP leadership in a drone strike in mid-January. The organisation is now decapitated and on the road to disintegration.
When the American Defence Secretary Robert Gates suggested in Islamabad a week later that the Pakistani military should mount an attack on safe havens in North Waziristan sheltering the ISI-backed Haqqani network, the very next day the official spokesman of the Pakistan Army, Maj Gen Athar Abbas, haughtily stated that Pakistan’s “over-stretched” armed forces had no plans for undertaking any fresh anti-militant operations in 2010.
This was seen as a snub to the Obama administration which decided to mount its own attacks, firing dozens of rockets from drones over the next few days. So far this year there have been more than 20 drone attacks in the Tribal areas. The pace of attacks moved up a gear after the killing of seven CIA officers in Khost at the end of December by a Jordanian suicide bomber who had been trained in Pakistan.
Faced with missile strikes that were increasingly targetted on important mujahideen leaders (and whose effectiveness was confirmed this week with the death in a drone strike of one of Jalaluddin Haqqani's sons), it is clear that Pakistan can no longer protect its 'assets' in the region and it therefore makes more sense to get the best possible negotiated deal.
Whether or not the arrest of Taliban military commander Mullah Barodar in Karachi is part of this new thinking by Pakistan is unclear, but the fact that more than a dozen top Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda figures - including two shadow provincial governors - have been arrested in the last two weeks makes it is hard not to conclude that a change of direction is underway.
Perhaps we can now begin to understand the optimism exhibited by US and British military commanders at the beginning of this year. Despite what appeared to be a dire situation, McChrystal et al were all very upbeat. They would have known about the events taking place in the background - the planned negotiations, the fact that both Hekmatyar and sections of the Taliban were willing to negotiate, the engagement of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and the OIC.
Fighting is still very intense in Helmand around the strategically important town of Marjah, where ISAF has already gone to great lengths to explain it is only interested in killing foreigners and die-hards. Will the momentum towards negotiations continue? My guess is that it will. The main issue now will be sorting out how the Taliban's main demand - for the withdrawal of foreign troops - can be finessed or renegotiated.
Update: Afghanistan's TolAfghan website is reporting that another senior Taliban leader, Mullah Abdul Kabir, head of its political committee, has also been captured in recent days.

UN list provides clues to Taliban leadership

It had not occurred to me before, but for anyone interested in the leadership of the Taliban in Afghanistan - and that includes the Haqqani faction as well as the Quetta Shura - then the list of banned individuals posted by the United Nations is a good starting point. While the actual composition of the Quetta Shura of the Taliban (QST) appears to be unknown, most of them are likely to appear on this list.
Amongst those on the list of 144 Taliban leaders are, for example, Ubaidullah Akhund, formerly the Taliban minister of defence, who is described as "one of the deputies of Mullah Omar, and a member of the Taliban's leadership, in charge of military operations". Sayed Esmatullah Asem is named as a member of the Taliban's leadership as of May 2007, and a member of the Taliban council of Peshawar. Abdul Ghani, aka Mullah Barodar, the Taliban's former deputy defence minister, is described thus: "Belongs to Popalzai tribe. Senior Taliban military commander and member of Taliban "Quetta Council" as of May 2007. Believed to be in the Afghanistan/Pakistan border area."
The list itself is clearly important to the QST. They have made it clear that they want to see it lifted as a precondition for negotiations with the Karzai government and the United States. At the moment, QST members who want to travel out of Afghanistan or Pakistan do so on Pakistani passports issued through the ISI. This is what happened, for example, when representatives of the QST travelled to Saudi Arabia for talks last year.
Earlier today, Kai Eide, the outgoing UN representative in Afghanistan, told the New York Times that some of the Afghans should be removed from the UN list. "If you want relevant results, then you have to talk to the relevant person in authority," Eide said. "The time has come to do it," he said, adding that the US should also carry out a review of the detainees held at the Bagram American military prison to see if any of them could be released.
The UN list itself can be found here. Only one person, General Rahmatullah Safi, the Taliban's former representative in Europe, has ever been removed from the list, in 2005. He died the following year.
Last week, according to the NYT, US special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, said “Some of the people on the list are dead, some shouldn’t be on the list and some are among the most dangerous people in the world. I would be all in favor of looking at the list on a case-by-case basis to see if there are people on the list who are on the list by mistake and should be removed, or in fact are dead”.
All UN member states are required to a) freeze funds and any other financial assets of anyone on the list; b) Prevent the entry into or the transit through their territories; c) Prevent the direct or indirect supply, sale, or transfer of arms and related material, to the individuals, groups, undertakings and entities placed on the Consolidated List.
Update: On Wednesday, the day before the London Conference, the UN lifted sanctions on five former Taliban officials, including former foreign minister Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil. The four others were the Taliban's deputy commerce minister, Faizl Mohammed Faizan; Abdul Hakim Monib, the deputy minister of frontier affairs who later renounced the Taliban and became a provincial governor; Mohammad Musa Hottak, the deputy planning minister who was later elected to parliament; and a former press officer, Shams-ul Safa Aminzai.

Who are the leaders of the Afghan Taliban?

Mullah Omar's Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan issued a statement on Friday condemning President Obama's decision to offer money to buy off fighters from the organisation. The statement, which predictably scoffed at the idea and pointed out that it had been tried and failed before, was not signed by Mullah Omar (pictured above), but by his deputy, Mullah Barodar Akhund.
This in itself is not surprising. Mullah Barodar (sometimes spelt Barader, but whose real name is Abdul Ghani) in much more involved in the day-to-day running of the military campaign against Coalition forces in Afghanistan than Mullah Omar, who is hidden from public sight.
However, it does raise the question of who is running the Islamic Emirate and who are the members of the so-called the Quetta Shura, based in the Baluchi city of that name.
In recent weeks it has become clear that some US commanders are in favour of using drone attacks to kill shura members, even though they have previously enjoyed close relations with the Pakistani military and intelligence services and that there have so far been no drone attacks in Baluchistan.
The answer to who is in the Quetta Shura is not easy to find. When US Ambassador to Pakistan Anne W Patterson provided a list of members of the Quetta Shura living in Pakistan (drawn up by US and Afghan intelligence officials) to the Pakistani government at the end of September, Pakistan’s chief military spokesman, Maj-Gen Athar Abbas, responded by saying that "From our judgment, there are no Taliban in Balochistan".
Asked about the names provided by Afghan and US officials, he said: "Six to 10 of them have been killed, two are in Afghanistan, and two are insignificant. When people call Mullah Omar the mayor of Quetta, that is incorrect."
So what do we know about the Quetta Shura? It is known internally as the Rahbari shura and is made up of at least 12 and maybe as many as 20 members. Mullah Omar does not attend, so Mullah Barodar is the most senior person present. The list handed to the Pakistani authorities has not been made public, but some of its members are known anyway as they date back to the time before the September 2001 attacks on America.
In 2003, at the time of its creation, the rahbari shura was thought to include: Jalaluddin Haqqani, Saifur Rahman Mansoor, Mullah Dadullah (replaced by Mullah Bakht), Akhtar Mohammad Osmani, Akhtar Mohammad Mansoor, Mullah Obaidullah, Hafiz Abdul Majeed, Mullah Mohammad Rasul, Mullah Barodar, and Mullah Abdur Razzaq Akhundzada.
Thomas Ruttig, in his report, The Other Side, written for the Afghan Analysts Network, and previously discussed on this blog, suggests that the Quetta shura also includes military commanders from the regions, including Taliban founder member Hafez Majid, Serajuddin Haqqani and Akhtar Mohammad Mansur.
Jeffrey Dressler, in his excellent report Securing Helmand, also previously reviewed here, says there are two main leadership bodies - the rahbari shura and the majlis al-shura or consultative council, with 13 members whose job is to advise the leadership. Dressler days that Mullah Barodar is in charge, particularly since the arrest of Mullah Obaidullah in March 2007 and the death of Mullah Dadullah in May 2007.
In addition he names Mullah Abdullah Zakir (real name Abdul Qayoum Zakir), a former Guantanamo inmate released in 2007, and Mullah Naim Barich, former Taliban minister for civil aviation and transport, as well as Mullah Mansur (see above).
On Monday, the authorities in Pakistan issued wanted posters of the leadership of Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan and offered huge rewards for their capture. Strange that in Afghanistan the leadership of the insurgency continues to be such a mystery.