Mullah Omar: A dogged Taliban chief rebounds, vexing United States

[Naveed Yaseen]

LAHORE: Eight years after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, Mullah Omar is leading an insurgency that has gained steady ground in much of Afghanistan against much better equipped American and NATO forces, representing a security challenge for the Obama administration that has “consumed the president’s advisers”.

“Far from a historical footnote, he [Mullah Omer] represents a vexing security challenge for the Obama administration – one that has consumed the president’s advisers, divided Democrats and left many Americans frustrated,” says the New York Times in an article.

“This is an amazing story,” said Bruce Riedel – a former Central Intelligence Agency officer who coordinated the Obama administration’s initial review of Afghanistan policy in the spring. “He’s a semiliterate individual who has met with no more than a handful of non-Muslims in his entire life. And he’s staged one of the most remarkable military comebacks in modern history,” he said.

According to the newspaper, “American officials are weighing the significance of this comeback: is Mullah Omar the brains behind shrewd shifts of Taliban tactics and propaganda in recent years, or does he have help from Pakistani intelligence? Might the Taliban be amenable to negotiations, as Mullah Omar hinted in a September 19 statement, or can his network be divided and weakened in some other way? Or is the Taliban’s total defeat required to ensure that Afghanistan will never again become a haven for Al Qaeda?”

The newspaper says that the man at the centre of the American policy conundrum remains a mystery, the subject of adoring mythmaking by his followers and guesswork by the world’s intelligence agencies. “He was born, by various accounts, in 1950 or 1959 or 1960 or 1962. He may be hiding near Quetta, Pakistan, or hunkered down in an Afghan village. No one is sure,” says NYT.

Alex Strick van Linschoten – a Dutch-born writer who lives in Kandahar, where Mullah Omar’s movement was born – said, “He can’t operate openly … there are too many people looking for him, and the eye he lost to Soviet shrapnel in the 1980s makes him recognisable. There are four or five people who can pass messages to Omar,” said Strick van Linschoten. “And then there’s a circle of people who can get access to those four or five people.”

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp...009_pg7_16