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Mullah Muhammad Omar has led a comeback. |
A dogged Taliban chief rebounds in Afghanistan, vexing US forces
WASHINGTON - In late 2001, Mullah Muhammad Omar’s prospects seemed utterly bleak. The ill-educated, one-eyed leader of the Taliban had fled on a motorbike after his fighters were swiftly routed by the Americans invading Afghanistan.
Much of the world celebrated his ouster, and Afghans cheered the return of girls’ education, music, and ordinary pleasures outlawed by the grim fundamentalist government.
Eight years later, Omar is the leader of an insurgency that has gained steady ground in much of Afghanistan against much better equipped American and NATO forces.
Far from a historical footnote, he represents a vexing security challenge for the Obama administration, one that has consumed the president’s advisers, divided the Democratic Party and left many Americans frustrated.
“This is an amazing story,’’ said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA 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.’’
American officials are weighing the significance of this comeback: Is Omar the man 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 Omar hinted in a Sept. 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 man at the center 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.
“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 recognizable, said Alex Strick van Linschoten, a Dutch-born writer who lives in Kandahar, where Omar’s movement was born, and who has helped a former Taliban official write a memoir.
Rahimullah Yusufzai, of The News International, a Pakistani newspaper, who interviewed Omar a dozen times before 2001, called him “a man of few words and not very knowledgeable about international affairs.’’
But his reputed humility, his legend as a ferocious fighter with the mujahedeen against Soviet invaders in the 1980s, and his success in ending the lawlessness and bloody warlords’ feuds of the early 1990s cemented his power.
© Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company.
