The rise of Mawlawi Haibatullah Akhundzada shows
that the Taliban’s old guard is still holding the reins of power -- and
deciding the future of the Afghan war.
The new head of the Taliban isn’t new
to the Taliban. Instead of choosing among rivals from a younger generation of
militants, the group has turned to a member of the old guard, Mawlawi
Haibatullah Akhundzada, to take the reins of the insurgency.
The militants moved quickly to elevate
Akhundzada, who was given his new post just four days after their former chief,
Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour, was killed in a U.S. drone
strike in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province.
Two members of the Taliban’s young
guard were seen as potential replacements: Sirajuddin Haqqani, the
hardline head of the insurgency’s military operations, and Mohammad Yaqob, the
son of the group’s reclusive founder, Mullah Mohammed Omar. They were
instead appointed as his deputies.
Naming either Haqqani or Yaqob as chief
could have aggravated fissures in the group, which faced internal divisions in
2015 after the Taliban acknowledged that Mullah Omar, its longtime leader, had
been dead for nearly two years.
Instead, the Taliban chose a relatively
obscure veteran of the insurgency who has worked under senior leaders in the
Taliban for more than two decades.
When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan from
1996 to 2001, Akhundzada helped mete out the group’s brutal idea of
justice as a cleric and top-ranking judge. Under the Taliban’s longtime chief,
Mullah Mohammad Omar, Akhundzada regularly issued fatwas justifying suicide
bombings and other Taliban atrocities, and presided over shadow courts in areas
under the insurgency’s sway.
Akhundzada represents a compromise
choice for the Taliban. He enjoys widespread respect inside the group as a
religious scholar but poses no clear threat to other powerful figures — he
comes to the job without having commanded military operations or served in a
leadership post, experts said.
“His selection makes sense from the
perspective of the Taliban. His religious background would make him a top
candidate to unify a very fragmented organization,” said Michael Kugelman, a
senior associate for South Asia at the Woodrow Wilson Center and Foreign Policy contributor.
Indeed, rather than a break with the
past, Akhundzada’s selection signals continuity for the insurgency, which has
seized upon the drawdown of U.S.-led forces to strike hard at the Afghan
government over the past year, including a series of lethal bombings in the
capital Kabul.
“Not much is going to change. I don’t
imagine that this new leader will come marching into peace
negotiations,” Kugelman said. “I see no reason why he would want to
break with the policy of his former boss, which was to avoid talks like the
plague.”
Omar’s successor, Mansour, was opposed
in some quarters of the insurgency from the outset, partly because he had
helped keep Omar’s death a secret.
Some Taliban members from the large
Noorzai tribe in the Kandahar region harbored acute resentment of Mansour and
rejected his authority. Akhundzada is himself a Noorzai, and his selection
could be aimed in part at bringing militants from his tribe back into the fold, said Seth Jones, a former advisor to U.S.
military commanders in Afghanistan.
His roots in the Pashtun heartland of
the insurgency in Kandahar, and the political skills he has honed during his
long tenure among senior ranks of the Taliban, could be crucial to his
survival, Jones said.
“Any good insurgency is first a
political organization that has a political vision, and the military arm is a
tool to realize the political vision,” Jones said. “So it makes sense for the
Taliban to choose a strong religious figure.”
Akhundzada will need all the
political acumen he can muster to keep a lid on the divisions inside the
insurgency, to counter the threat posed by former Taliban fighters who have
pledged loyalty to the Islamic State in eastern Afghanistan and to manage
relations with the group’s patrons in Pakistan, experts said.
But to assert his authority initially,
the new chief will need to push for major assaults on the battlefield and more
deadly terror attacks in Kabul to demonstrate the strength of the insurgency
despite the loss of its leader in the American drone raid, experts said.
“The first thing he has to do is to
avenge the death of Mansour,” said Barnett Rubin, a former senior U.S. diplomat
with years of experience in Afghanistan. “He can’t even contemplate any peace
talks until he has avenged Mansour’s death.”
Only hours after the Taliban announced
its new leader on Wednesday, it claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing
that killed at least 10 people and wounded four Afghans, in an attack that
targeted a bus carrying employees from a court west of Kabul.
No comments:
Post a Comment