When Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour was killed recently in a US drone strike, we noted that experts cautioned that it would make local insurgents even less likely to participate in long-stalled peace efforts, and it would likely lead to an escalation of Taliban retaliation efforts.
Mullah Akhtar Mansour, Taliban militants’ leader
The key question around the US killings of militant leaders is do they even work? This is something the Wall Street Journal also pondered in a recent piece on just how effective US strikes on leaders of militant groups are in the long run.
On one hand, it does appear as though the killing of Osama bin Laden has hurt Al Qaeda; on the other, the killing of Mansour may not have much of an impact at all on the Taliban.
From the WSJ
Both the 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan and the targeting of Mullah Mansour on a Pakistani road were major successes for U.S. intelligence and the Pentagon.
Al Qaeda’s central command, a relatively tight international terror network now led by Ayman al-Zawahiri, has been in decline since bin Laden’s death. It has been unable to fully recover from the blow or to mount major attacks against the West.
But the experience is less encouraging for wide-scale insurgencies such as the Afghan Taliban. While such decapitations can provide a short-term gain, they rarely change the course of the conflict—and frequently backfire if not accompanied by a much broader, resource-intensive involvement of a kind the White House has been loath to pursue.
Unlike al Qaeda, the Taliban enjoy support from a significant swath of the Afghan population. The group’s military advances in 2013-15 weren’t impeded by the fact that its leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, was secretly dead at the time, or by the assassinations of scores of commanders.
In announcing Mullah Mansour’s death, President Barack Obama said his killing “gives the people of Afghanistan and the region a chance at a different, better future.”
That optimistic assessment isn’t shared by many, in the region or in the U.S., who closely follow the Taliban.
“I don’t think it will weaken the Taliban, and it may strengthen them,” said Barnett Rubin, a former U.S. State Department official who worked on peace negotiations with the Taliban and who is now associate director of the Center on International Cooperation at New York University.
As we warned the death – which carried the added “benefit” of further infuriating Pakistan which accused the US of violating its sovereignty with the mission – will make peace talks next to impossible, while pushing the militants to an even more extreme fringe.
It is also far from certain that removing Mullah Mansour would make such peace talks—an avowed U.S. goal—any easier to resume.
The minister of aviation in the pre-2001 Taliban government, Mullah Mansour belonged to the original generation of Taliban leaders, was involved in the political outreach, and could influence field commanders. His successor named on Wednesday, Maulavi Haibatullah, is believed to represent a more uncompromising cast.
“After this killing, the Taliban will be more hard-line and the people who think that the war will solve all the problems will be more powerful. This is a blow to peace,” said Waheed Muzhda, a Kabul political analyst who served in the Taliban regime’s foreign ministry before 2001.
U.S. officials have argued that, with Mr. Mansour, there wasn’t any peace process to derail anyway.
Splinter groups, like ISIS which grew apart from Al Qaeda (with the careful grooming of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and of course, the CIA) prove resilient when it comes to the aftermath of leaders being killed, often times using violence more indiscriminantly than the parent group because of the need to recruit. Unlike killing leaders of the Pakistani Taliban, which helped the Pakistani government engineer further splits, groups such as ISIS will lead to a new cycle of attacks and create greater chaos.
That was, in effect, the behavior of Islamic State, which resorted to uninhibited violence as it grew apart from al Qaeda, a process accelerated by bin Laden’s death. The U.S. was successful in killing the group’s founder Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in 2006 and his successor Abu Omar al-Baghdadi in 2010.
But as long as the sectarian tension that originally fueled Islamic State’s growth in Iraq persisted, the organization proved resilient and was able to feed off the Syrian war to capture a sizable chunk of both countries in 2014.
Arguably, the record is better with the U.S. drone killings of the leaders of Pakistani Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud in 2009 and his successor Hakimullah Mehsud in 2013. These strikes and the climate of suspicion that they fomented provoked infighting among various factions of the group, known as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan. That made it easier for the Pakistani military to launch a major ground offensive into the TTP stronghold of North Waziristan in 2014.
“Killing them has helped the Pakistani government to engineer further splits, and to drive the TTP where they are today—fragmented,” said Imtiaz Gul, executive director of the Center for Research and Security Studies in Pakistan.
The attack on Mullah Mansour came at a time when the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan has shrunk to just 9,800 troops, a fraction of the level a few years ago, and when Afghanistan’s embattled security forces struggle to counter Taliban offensives.
His death “would lead to a new cycle of attacks and counterattacks,” cautioned Vali Nasr, dean of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and a former U.S. State Department senior adviser on Afghanistan and Pakistan.
“All of this needs a much greater U.S. engagement in Afghanistan than the U.S. has troops for,“ Mr. Nasr said. ”It is extremely risky because it can actually create greater chaos. You cannot deal with a larger insurgency through the tactic of decapitation.”
While it is difficult to tell whether or not killing a militant group leader will help or hinder efforts to defeat such groups, by now the incontrovertible evidence is that such direct and deadly interventions do much more harm than good. Which may be precisely why the US continues to engage in such missions, knowing full well that selective killings will continue to splinter groups, create further chaos, and unleash the “need” for the “boots on the ground” as was the case in Syria.
Pardon, did we say, the US government? We meant the US military-industiral complex: after all everyone by now knows who calls the shots in the Pentago. As for the MIC’s facade, rest assured that if the US wants to start a war for any myriad of reasons, it knows precisely how to do just that.
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