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KABUL (PAN): A serious power struggle has broken out among the Afghan Taliban’s top leaders. Over the past few days, two top-ranking members of the Quetta Shura have been battling for control -- and according to one source, their feud has already resulted in the assassination of one senior Taliban official by members of an opposing faction.
The centre of the storm is the Taliban’s top military leader, the former Guantanamo detainee Mullah Abdul Qayyum. Years ago he earned a reputation as a merciless fighter on the battlefield, but fellow insurgents say that as a commander he is often brutal to underlings and he seems incapable of responding quickly to changing conditions on the ground.
Recently complaints from senior commanders in the field have risen to crisis levels. According to both a senior member of the ruling council and a former cabinet minister in the Taliban regime, commanders accused him of showing no respect for his men in the field ground and ignoring their basic needs.
For the past two months he has also ignored the Quetta Shura’s meetings. Last week the leadership council gathered in Pakistan near the city of Peshawar, and Akhtar Muhammad Mansoor, a longtime rival for control of the insurgency, called Zakir, asking him to attend and if possible to address the commanders’ complaints. Zakir merely ignored the invitation.
The meeting took place anyway, and Mansoor took the occasion to declare his own control over the whole insurgency and to announce the dismissal of many commanders who had been appointed by Zakir. The sacked officials included Sayyid Ala ud-Din Agha, the overall commander of the insurgency’s southern front; Mullah Ruhul Amin, the chief of the military council for Helmand province; Daro Khan, the shadow governor of central Daikundi province; and Mullah Abasa, the head of the Taliban’s medical division. “All of them were members of Zakir’s faction,” says the former minister. “Now we’re waiting to see how Zakir reacts.”
It seems likely that Zakir will respond in much the same way as Mansoor Dadullah did five years ago, after he was canned as commander of the forces that had been led by his late brother, the notorious Mullah Dadullah Akhund. He demanded proof that the order had come from the Taliban’s supreme leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar. There was no proof. There has been no confirmed sighting of Omar since he vanished into the Kandahar mountains 12 years ago amid the chaos of the 2001 invasion. “Zakir would say the same thing,” the former minister predicts. “He would say, ‘Only Mullah Omar can remove me, and unless I have verifiable proof, I will not step down.’”
“Yes, the insurgency is still going, but it’s like a runaway camel,” the former ministry official says. “In the end it will fall into a pit.”
That’s the basic problem. In the Omar’s absence the Taliban have no indisputable lines of authority. “The Taliban were distinguished by their unity, but now each top leader is promoting his own loyalists and his own faction,” says a former member of the Quetta Shura. “It’s making the Taliban very much weaker.” The organization has been deteriorating ever since Pakistan arrested Omar’s second in command, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, in early 2010, and subordinates including Zakir and Mansoor began jockeying for power.
They derived their authority from having been appointed to lesser positions by Baradar in Omar’s name. “The Taliban formula was that anyone who has been appointed must be followed, regardless of his ability.” Things inevitably fell apart. “That formula worked when Mullah Omar was our operational leader,” says a source who was a high-ranking official in the regime’s Culture Ministry before the 2001 U.S. invasion. “But how could it work now that he is neither dead nor alive?”
Some insurgents blame Mansoor as well as Zakir for the Taliban’s setbacks. Both men have failed to gain territory in the southern Afghan provinces of Kandahar and Helmand. On the contrary, they have lost control of former Taliban strongholds. “Since the situation on the ground has not improved in the Taliban’s birthplaces, they’ve started pointing fingers at each other,” says the former cabinet minister. “Now things have reached this stage.” To make the situation worse, he says, none of the other current leaders have any outstanding abilities as military commanders or as leaders.
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