Farooq Ganderbali
Reports indicate that a special unit of the Afghan National Directorate of Security (NDS) has been tasked to split the Taliban. It is not as though the NDS is new to this game and knows the perils of counter-intelligence operations with a view to penetrating terrorist organizations.
Reports of the NDS doing what it has to, is evidence both of the present unity and military strength of the Taliban. What has emerged in recent weeks is that Sirajuddin Haqqani, Deputy Leader of the Taliban has been asked by Pakistan’s intelligence agency ISI to unite the various factions of the Taliban in the run up to the Taliban’s new offensive in Afghanistan code named Op. Omari. The ISI has thus managed to unite the Taliban and as one observer pertinently points out “has inducted the Haqqani group as the ‘steel frame’ of the Taliban forces”.
Since taking over the leadership of the Taliban last year, Mullah Mansoor Akhtar has been faced with factionalism, unheard of before under Mullah Omar. Recent factionalism within the Taliban under Mullah Rasool Akhund for instance, who broke away because he did not want to accept the leadership of Mullah Mansoor Akhtar, known to be close to Pakistan’s ISI is a challenge for the Taliban leadership.
In the initial days, the Taliban office in Doha under Tayyab Agha took a stand different from that of Mullah Mansoor Akhtar. Then Agha resigned to protest Mansoor Akhtar’s appointment to be replaced by Abbas Stanikzai, head of the Doha office. Others include, Mullah Jan Mohammad Madani, Mullah Shahabuddin Dilawar, Suhail Shahin, Mohammad Zahid Ahmadzai and Abdul Salam Hanafi. The Qatar Taliban office takes orders from Quetta Shura.
Since taking over, Mullah Mansoor Akhtar has had to use everything in the book from use of force to financial inducements to get Mullah Rasool Akhund to join the main faction. To that end, in March 2016 Pakistan ‘arrested’ Rasool a month ago in Peshawar, with the aim of turning him around. Earlier, when breaking away from Mansoor Akhtar, Rasool had publicly indicated that the Pak ISI had wanted him to carry out political assassinations, which he refused. Subsequently, in an interview to a UK based think-tank, Rasool Akhund had said that Mansoor Akhtar was unlikely to join in talks with the Afghan government as he was consolidating his position and he was getting sufficient funds from the drugs money.
In the interim, Mansoor Akhtar reportedly managed to get Mullah Qayyum Zakir, a former Taliban military commander to swear allegiance to him. Thus, it is clear that the Taliban under Mansoor Akhtar is trying to bring unity to a divide house, the best evidence of this being seen in the fierce intra-organization battles fought in Zabol earlier in the year between the Rasool and Akhtar factions.
For Afghanistan, the key issue is battling the Taliban on home turf and this is becoming increasingly difficult in Helmand and Kunduz. Faced with the twin challenges of the Islamic State and Taliban, it would prefer to have a divided Taliban. A united Taliban is on the other hand, to Pakistan’s advantage.
With President Ashraf Ghani having decided to turn his back on Afghanistan and threatening to take Pakistan to the UNSC, Pakistan has gone back to its old ways. Sartaj Aziz’s recent remarks on Pakistan providing shelter to the Taliban and their families has now been added to by his remarks in early May 2016 dismissing demands by Afghan President Ghani that Pakistan evict Taliban insurgents through military action or arrest and hand them over to Kabul for trial and punishment for killing innocent Afghans. The only reason for this retort to President Ghani suggests that the Pak Army and ISI believe that the Taliban is on the roll.
With the US administration in the midst of an election campaign one does not visualise President Obama taking major decisions on Afghanistan. Realising this, Pakistan has used the Haqqani Network to unify the Taliban and tasked the Taliban to attack the sinews of the Afghan government. This makes the challenge for President Ghani doubly difficult as the Islamic State and al Qaeda are not far behind in taking a leaf out of the Taliban’s book and try and exploit the weakness of the National Unity Government.
Pakistan must be banking on the Taliban to get into a position of power in Afghanistan before they condescend to talking to the Afghan government. For this purpose, Islamabad will do anything to ‘legitimise’ the Afghan Taliban leadership, including Sirajuddin Haqqani. The nub of the matter is that unless President Ghani intensifies efforts to weaken the Taliban, the Government is unlikely to succeed. The other pre-requisite, of course will be to strengthen the Afghan National Army and other security forces, in terms of weapons, equipment and firepower. More importantly, as US commander in Afghanistan General John Nicholson recently stated, US forces must be given permission to directly take-on Taliban targets. This will improve the ground situation substantially. Provision of air support to the Afghan forces is another of those things that are always in the wish list, but never granted. All these measures require regional and international support.
Perhaps when the Indian PM visits Herat towards the end of the month to inaugurate the Salma Dam (renamed now as the Afghanistan-India Friendship Dam), President Ghani will take PM Modi aside and discuss this new factor in Afghanistan’s security landscape. It is hoped that this will give the necessary impetus to closer relations between India and Afghanistan and assist Kabul in regaining lost ground.
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