USA TODAY International Edition
U. S. kills Taliban leader and sends message to Pakistan
About 3 o’clock in the after- noon Saturday, a man whose Pakistani passport said he was Wali Muhammad was being driven in a car in the 100 degree- plus heat along the road to the city of Quetta. The man surely thought he was safe because American drones had never struck that part of Pakistan. Then a U. S. missile hit his car, incinerating him and his driver, and that’s where the story gets interesting.
U. S. officials confirmed Monday that Wali Muhammad was actually Mullah Akhtar Mansoor, until that moment the leader of the Taliban forces that have been fighting and killing Afghans and Americans next door in Afghanistan for the past 15 years.
Mansoor oversaw repeated vicious attacks in Afghanistan that helped the Taliban gain more territory than at any time since U. S. forces invaded Afghanistan in 2001. He was regarded as an obstacle to peace talks. So his death is welcome news, particularly if it throws the Taliban leadership into turmoil, triggers a power struggle and disrupts the thriving narcotics trade that Mansoor is said to have operated. But if history is any guide, Mansoor, who only formally became leader of the Taliban last summer, might well be replaced by someone even fiercer and less inclined to negotiate with the Afghans.
What’s most significant about Saturday’s drone strike is where it took place: in the southwestern Pakistani province of Baluchistan, where U. S. officials have long acquiesced to a hands- off policy, apparently for fear of antagonizing a nominal ally that actually shelters the Taliban and other anti- American Islamist forces.
Mansoor rose to leadership of the Taliban during a meeting in Quetta that The New York Times described as “very public” and attended by “large gatherings” of Taliban. And Osama bin Laden managed to live for years after the 9/ 11 attacks in a compound in Abbottabad, about 15 hours northeast of Quetta by car. Both Quetta and Abbottabad are cities in Pakistan, of course.
Just as they did with the attack that killed bin Laden, U. S. officials told Pakistani officials only after the strike on Mansoor so no one would tip off the Taliban leader. Pakistanis were embarrassed and furious after the bin Laden strike; this time, the reaction was more muted. Officials there have long tacitly condoned drone attacks in the so- called tribal areas in northwest Pakistan, but this was the first such strike in Baluchistan, according to The Long War Journal, which tracks drone attacks.
It should not be the last. The Taliban has long made Baluchistan a haven for its insurgency in Afghanistan. It has been officially ignored but privately supported by Pakistan intelligence and military authorities, who have backed them to deter aggression by rival India in Afghanistan.
That duplicitous policy has cost American lives in Afghanistan, and it’s long past time for the U. S. to change the rules. If the strike on Mansoor is a sign that the days of the Taliban having a safe zone just across the border in Pakistan are over, that is an encouraging development.