The Taliban undead

The announcement of the death of Taliban commander Mullah Omar – albeit two years too late – has set off a power struggle within the Afghan Taliban that may not bode well for the future of the region. The process to ‘elect’ Mullah Akhtar Mansoor as the new chief of the militant group has been contested by none other than the family of the deceased Taliban leader. On Sunday, a statement by Mullah Abdul Manan, brother of Mullah Omar, rejected the election of Mansoor and refused to pledge allegiance to him. Another dissident group of senior Taliban cadres formally announced the launch of another Taliban shura, claiming that Mansoor had been elected in ‘haste’ by a few people. These new developments will be a blow to Mansoor and the Taliban whose members have sympathy for the family of their former head. A day earlier, Mansoor had issued an audio message for unity in the Taliban to ‘defeat their enemies’. The audio message by Mullah Manan offered a compromise by calling on ‘Islamic scholars’ to resolve differences between the different sides, instead of rushing to declare allegiance. He insisted that the unity of the Taliban was always supreme.
The situation shows that the terse tribal allegiances keeping the Taliban together were always weak, and perhaps creates an opportunity for the Afghan government to take advantage of any fissures in the Taliban. The sense is that Manan and the Mullah Omar family are backing the candidacy of Mullah Omar’s 27-year-old son Mullah Yaqoob. However, reports emerged on Tuesday that Yaqoob was either killed or under house arrest on the orders of Mullah Mansoor. Either way, it appears the rivalry with Mullah Mansoor is not one about exchanging pleasantries. Mullah Mansoor himself received the backing of Jalaluddin Haqqani, who had himself been rumored to be dead only a few days ago. In the Taliban, it appears its dead commanders can speak. A statement had been issued in the name of Mullah Omar only a few days before his death was confirmed. Whatever the future may hold for the militant group, it is clear that it has a crisis of leadership at hand. Most blatantly, this was exposed by the fact that Omar’s death had been hidden from internal and external circuits for two years, and any written statement from Haqqani is barely believable until the man is heard from. While Mullah Mansoor had taken the position that he would follow a consultative method, the hasty decision that came from the Quetta and Peshawar shuras was always likely to be a contested one. However strange it is to see an organisation that was held together by a dead leader calling for a re-election, Mullah Mansoor may need to agree to one to keep the Taliban intact. There are important consequences for the peace process, which Pakistan has been backing and which is now looking tenuous. What is also clear is that Afghanistan is not ready for all-out war against the Taliban, so we may just be forced to play a waiting game as the situation within the Taliban clears up.