Taliban Chief Extends Control Over Insurgency

Source - Wall Street Journal, June 22, 2009

By MATTHEW ROSENBERG in Peshawar, Pakistan, and YOCHI J. DREAZEN and SIOBHAN GORMAN in Washington

Mullah Omar, supreme leader of the Taliban, is reasserting direct control over the militant group's loose-knit insurgency in Afghanistan, ordering attacks and shuffling field commanders in preparation for the arrival of thousands of additional U.S. troops, according to U.S. officials and insurgents in Afghanistan.

Until recently, the ground-level conduct of the Taliban's war against the U.S.-led coalition has been left to local commanders acting on their own. Mr. Omar, who heads a Taliban leadership council called the Quetta "shura" -- named after the city in southeast Pakistan where it is believed to be based -- has typically focused on choosing Taliban leaders and funneling money, religious guidance and strategic advice to fighters.

But since the start of the year, through his direct lieutenants, Mr. Omar has ordered a spate of suicide bombings and assassinations in southern and eastern Afghanistan that presage a bloody phase to come in the Afghan war, according to U.S. officials and Afghan insurgents.

Mullah Omar, supreme leader of the Taliban, is reasserting direct control over the militant group's loose-knit insurgency in Afghanistan, ordering attacks and shuffling field commanders in preparation for the arrival of thousands of additional U.S. troops, according to U.S. officials and insurgents in Afghanistan.

Until recently, the ground-level conduct of the Taliban's war against the U.S.-led coalition has been left to local commanders acting on their own. Mr. Omar, who heads a Taliban leadership council called the Quetta "shura" -- named after the city in southeast Pakistan where it is believed to be based -- has typically focused on choosing Taliban leaders and funneling money, religious guidance and strategic advice to fighters.

But since the start of the year, through his direct lieutenants, Mr. Omar has ordered a spate of suicide bombings and assassinations in southern and eastern Afghanistan that presage a bloody phase to come in the Afghan war, according to U.S. officials and Afghan insurgents.

Associated Press

U.S. Marines, searching for Taliban fighters, entered a mud compound near Now Zad in Afghanistan's Helmand province on Saturday. The U.S. is sending thousands of additional troops to the country.

One target was Ahmed Wali Karzai, the younger brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who survived a gun and rocket attack on his motorcade in eastern Afghanistan on May 18. Qari Sayed Ahmad, a moderate cleric, was gunned down outside his home in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in April. The Taliban took credit for the attack, and a midlevel Taliban commander in southern Afghanistan said in a telephone interview that the assassination was carried out on orders from one of Mr. Omar's lieutenants.

In another unusual attack in mid-May, nearly a dozen suicide bombers struck targets in the provincial capital of Khost in eastern Afghanistan, leaving at least 12 dead, not including the bombers. U.S. officials say the attack was ordered by the Quetta shura.

On Sunday, a rocket attack on the U.S.'s Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan killed two soldiers and wounded six other Americans, including two civilians, the military said. No one claimed credit for the attack.

"This is Quetta's answer to Obama's surge," said a senior member of a militant network led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an independent Afghan warlord who fights alongside the Taliban. He was referring to plans by the administration of President Barack Obama to send an additional 21,000 troops to Afghanistan over the next few months. The Quetta "are not ready to lay down their weapons," he said in an interview in the Pakistani city of Peshawar.

Before 2001, the Taliban in Afghanistan was highly centralized, but it quickly fragmented when coalition forces invaded and has run as a series of affiliated but largely independent factions since then, fighting piecemeal against U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan and Pakistani troops in northwestern Pakistan. Estimates of the number of Taliban vary, but there are believed to be tens of thousands.

Mullah Omar

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• About 60 years old
• Fought the Soviet occupation in the 1980s
• Founded the Taliban in 1994
• By 1996, Taliban controlled large sections of Afghanistan, including Kabul, the capital

The new effort by Mr. Omar and his leadership council to re-establish direct control over these forces marks a significant new stage in the eight-year war in Afghanistan, at a time when the Taliban has had the upper hand but faces a major push on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in coming months.

In addition to the new U.S. troops, Pakistan's army says it is planning a major offensive against the Taliban's stronghold in South Waziristan near the Afghan border; on Sunday, fighter jets and artillery pounded suspected militant positions there, killing at least 27 insurgents, according to the Associated Press.

Mr. Omar's push to centralize command has irked some rank-and-file Taliban, insurgents say, potentially leaving them more amenable to U.S. and Afghan outreach efforts. Drawing on a tactic first used in Iraq, the U.S. has been reaching out to moderate Taliban fighters in the hopes of reconciling them into Afghanistan's political process.

However, Mr. Omar's re-emergence could also lead to a more centralized and coordinated -- and violent -- insurgency that would pose an even greater threat, U.S. officials and insurgents say.

"The Taliban have always been very adaptable; we haven't given them enough credit for that," said Henry A. Crumpton, a former State Department counterterrorism chief who led the Central Intelligence Agency's Afghanistan campaign in 2001 and 2002 and is now president of Crumpton Group, which advises companies investing in emerging markets.

The reclusive Mr. Omar, believed to be about 60 years old, lost an eye fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. In 1994, he led a small band of armed students from Islamic seminaries -- "Taliban" means "students" in Afghanistan's Pashto language -- to fight the violence and corruption that had overwhelmed the country.

Within two years, Mr. Omar's group had taken control of Kabul, the capital, and most of the country. Under his rule, girls were banned from going to school and almost all forms of modern entertainment -- music, movies, dancing -- were forbidden. The Taliban sheltered Osama bin Laden, and Mr. Omar fled to Pakistan after the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan; he carries a $10 million U.S. bounty on his head.

Pakistani officials refuse to acknowledge the existence of the Quetta shura. They continue to balk at U.S. demands for action against it, American officials say, despite Washington's sharing of communications intercepts and other sensitive intelligence information with their Pakistani counterparts. Pakistani intelligence and military officials say the U.S. intelligence isn't conclusive.

Until recently, the shura had taken a hands-off role, sending money to Taliban field commanders for salaries and weapons and taking donations from foreign charitable foundations and individuals, which remain a key source of Taliban funding, according to U.S. and Afghan officials.

The council has been so successful in raising money from wealthy Arab supporters in the Persian Gulf that it has drawn funding that would otherwise go to al Qaeda, U.S. intelligence officials said. That has left al Qaeda scrambling to raise money, while its leadership is in disarray because dozens of leaders have been killed by U.S. missile strikes in Pakistan, U.S. intelligence officials said.

Large elements of the Taliban insurgency remain independent of the Quetta shura. Most of the Pakistan Taliban, an offshoot of the Afghan Taliban, have no operational links to Mr. Omar; the powerful Afghan insurgent network of Jalaluddin Haqqani and his son Sirajuddin pledges loyalty to Mr. Omar but operates on its own; Mr. Hekmatyar, who fought the Taliban in the 1990s, is only a loose ally.

But the Quetta shura is issuing direct combat orders to those it can directly control, according to Afghan insurgents and U.S. military officials with direct access to intelligence garnered from communication intercepts and the interrogations of captured Taliban members.

"It's to the point where they're saying, 'use a suicide bomber to blow up target X on Y day of the month,'" said one U.S. official.

The shura also is depositing caches of weapons across eastern and southern Afghanistan, hiring additional fighters and appointing local commanders responsible for the militants in individual Afghan towns, valleys and districts, a U.S. defense official said.

It has replaced a number of senior field commanders and so-called "shadow governors" who are Taliban senior leaders in Afghan provinces, say officials and insurgents.

The Taliban's efforts appear to be led by two senior figures. The first, Mullah Berader, is a longtime senior Taliban leader who sits on the Quetta shura, which is believed to have about 20 members. "We've been trying to kill him for a long time. He has 20 lives," said a former senior U.S. intelligence official.

The other is Mullah Zakir, who is running the Taliban's military operations in the south and east, say U.S. and Pakistani officials and Afghan insurgents. Mr. Zakir, whose real name is Abdullah Gulam Rasoul, was captured by U.S. forces in northern Afghanistan in 2001. He was held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, until being transferred to Afghan custody in 2007. He was released by Afghan authorities soon after for reasons that remain unclear.

authorities soon after for reasons that remain unclear.