Juan Cole: If the Taliban Reconquer Afghanistan, Does It Matter If Mullah Omar Died?

http://www.thenation.com/article/if-the-taliban-reconquer-afghanistan-does-it-matter-if-mullah-omar-died/

The announcement of the death of the figure lionized by followers as “Commander of the Faithful” comes on the eve of a second round of talks between the Afghan government and representatives of the guerrilla group, to be held in Qatar or China in days. A message purportedly from Mullah Omar on the occasion of Eid al-Fitr (the Festival of Fast Breaking) two weeks ago had endorsed the negotiations, a less hard-line position than the leader had taken for many years. The coincidence of this report with the new talks has raised suspicions that someone is attempting to manipulate the political context in which they take place.

The Taliban themselves are divided on whether to negotiate. Many feel they are making excellent progress on the battlefield and should fight on until victory. Others are tired of decades of war and think that with the departure of most Western forces, they have a chance to reshape the constitution through diplomacy. (NATO forces will have no role in Afghanistan after 2016, though the Obama administration wants to keep several thousand men there, apparently indefinitely, most as trainers.)

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The Taliban took as many as 80 more villages in the northern province of Kunduz, which has a population of more than a million. Unlike most of the country’s northern provinces, about a third of the population of Kunduz hails from the Pashtun ethnic group, a key political base for the Taliban. The fundamentalists are said to have taken over half of this strategic province, which controls trade and smuggling routes to Tajikistan and thence to Central Asia. They appear to be preparing to take the provincial capital, also called Kunduz, a city of 300,000, emulating ISIL’s conquest of Ramadi in Iraq. Even when NATO kept a presence in the province, there were only 1,000 police, and it was a site of disorder, used by the Taliban to smuggle fuel in from Tajikistan. A German-ordered bombing of two such fuel trucks in 2009 killed large numbers of civilians and left a bad taste in the mouths of locals.

At the same time that the Taliban are making advances, they face increasing competition from ISIL (ISIS, Daesh). Even the Taliban’s long-time ally, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, leader of the so-called “Islamic Party” (Hezb-i-Islami), has allegedly told his fighters that in any firefight between the Taliban and ISIL, they should take ISIL’s side. It is possible that the pro-negotiation faction in the Taliban feels that becoming part of the Kabul establishment through negotiations can shore up their authority against this insurgent challenge. (Hekmatyar was recruited by the CIA for its war on the leftists in Afghanistan in the 1980s and received the lion’s share of Reagan administration money via the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence. He turned against the United States when the Bush administration invaded Afghanistan in 2001.)