Pakistani Taliban
Pick Hard Liner as Leader -Imperiling Proposed Peace Talks
In a
surprise choice that bodes poorly for proposed peace talks, the Pakistani
Taliban on Thursday appointed as their new leader the hard-line commander
responsible for last year’s attack on Malala Yousafzai, the
teenage Pakistani education activist.
The Taliban’s governing council chose Mullah Fazlullah, the head
of a militant faction in the northwestern Swat Valley, after six days of
deliberations, Taliban officials told reporters. Mr. Fazlullah is best known
for ordering public beatings, executions and beheadings, and delivering
thunderous radio broadcasts — in which he denounced polio vaccinations, among
other topics — that earned him the nickname “Mullah Radio” in some circles.
Celebratory gunfire erupted in North Waziristan, the tribal
district that is Pakistan’s main militant hub, after Mr. Fazlullah’s accession
was announced. But the news was likely to be received with less enthusiasm by
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s government.
Furious officials criticized the United States’ killing of the previous
Taliban leader, Hakimullah Mehsud, in a drone strike last Friday,
claiming that the Mr. Mehsud had been on the verge of starting peace talks with
the government.
But few believed those talks had much chance of success, and Mr.
Fazlullah, who reneged on a previous peace deal in 2009, offers even dimmer
hopes. On Thursday, his spokesman, Shahidullah Shahid, said there would be “no
more talks as Mullah Fazlullah is already against negotiations.”
Instead, Mr. Shahid said, the Taliban were planning retaliatory
attacks against the federal government in Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous
province. Mr. Sharif “bargained and sold out Hakimullah to the Americans,” he
said.
For the Pakistani military, Mr. Fazlullah is a cherished enemy. He
escaped the army’s toughest anti-Taliban offensive of recent years in 2009
when, as thousands of soldiers swept through Swat, after the collapse of a
peace deal, he fled across the border into Afghanistan.
Since then he is believed to have been hiding in Kunar and
Nuristan Provinces in eastern Afghanistan, using the mountains as a base to
stage attacks inside Pakistan, including the attack on Ms. Yousafzai, who was
shot in the head by a Taliban gunman in October 2012.
Mr. Fazlullah claimed a major military target this year when his
fighters killed a two-star army general in Dir district, near the Afghan
border, in September.
Mr. Fazlullah was not the favored candidate to succeed Mr. Mehsud
because he did not hail from the Mehsud tribe, which has dominated the
leadership of the Pakistani Talibansince
the group was founded in 2007.
The ranks of the Mehsud leadership, however, have been thinned by
the C.I.A. drone campaign. Strikes in North and South Waziristan killed both
Hakimullah and his predecessor, Baitullah Mehsud, who died in 2009.
A former security official, speaking on the condition of
anonymity, said Mr. Fazlullah had been chosen to avert a rift between rival
Mehsud factions inside the Taliban.
The Taliban also appointed Khalid Haqqani, a little-known
commander from a rural district near Peshawar, as the deputy commander,
effectively signaling a shift in the Taliban leadership from the tribal belt to
neighboring Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province.
“This changes the entire equation,” said one senior government
official in Peshawar.
Mr. Fazlullah, believed to be in his late 30s, offers the Taliban
the opportunity of a possible new direction, led by a figure with a reputation
for being charismatic, ruthless and publicity-savvy.
From a poor family, Mr. Fazlullah started his adult life as the
operator of a chairlift that spanned the river Swat. He rose to public
prominence in 2007 by riding on a white horse into Swat, a picturesque area
once popular with honeymooning couples.
He set up a pirate radio station that broadcast jihadist
propaganda across the valley, at one point urging women not to sleep with their
husbands if they refused to join his jihad. Soon afterward, armed fighters
displaced the civil government, instituting an authoritarian and often cruel
rule that mandated public floggings, executions and the closing of girls’
schools.
The provincial and federal governments struggled to respond to Mr.
Fazlullah’s swagger, signing two peace deals with his father-in-law, Sufi
Muhammad, in a bid to re-establish calm in the valley. But those compromises
quickly foundered — there was public outrage across Pakistan over a video that
showed Taliban fighters flogging a teenage girl in Swat — and by the summer of
2009, the army had moved in.
Since then, the Swat Taliban have been reduced to hit-and-run
attacks, while the army has been accused by human rights groups of carrying out
summary executions of people suspected of being militants.
The Taliban’s most infamous operation of recent years was the
attack on Ms. Yousafzai, then 15. At the time, Mr. Fazlullah’s spokesman said
she had been shot for her advocacy, and vowed to shoot her again if she
returned to Swat. Ms. Yousafzai was flown to Britain for emergency treatment,
where she recovered from her injuries, and has gone on to become a global
celebrity.
Mr. Fazlullah’s rise now presents potential difficulties for Imran
Khan, the former cricket star whose party governs Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province,
of which Swat is one district. Mr. Khan has threatened to block NATO military supply lines into
Afghanistan after Nov. 20 if the United States does not halt drone attacks in
the tribal belt.
But Mr. Khan’s aggressive anti-American stance could be
complicated by a new wave of Taliban violence — particularly if it is
engineered by a Taliban leader who hails from the province that Mr. Khan
controls.
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