Afghanistan

[Shahab3]

The Taliban after Mullah Omar & the battle for Afghanistan
With Mullah Omar's death there is uncertainity over Taliban's future. India must engage all actors including Taliban.
Rohan Joshi
August 11, 2015 Last Updated at 05:00 IST
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The announcement of Omar’s death itself raises several questions. What was the source of information that led to the Afghan government’s press release? Was it the Pakistanis who informed the Afghan government of Omar’s death, as Amrullah Saleh, former chief of Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security (NDS) believes?

This certainly is one possibility. Pakistan has steadfastly refuted what is effectively the worst-kept secret of the fifteen-year war by claiming that Omar was in hiding in Afghanistan and was not in fact living in Quetta, the capital of Pakistan’s Balochistan province. It would have been odd, then, for them to confirm the death of someone they claim wasn’t even living in their country.

Was the timing of the announcement meant to coincide with the second round of talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban and their sponsors, the Pakistani Army? If so, does one surmise that President Ghani has finally shown his hand and turned the tables on the Taliban and their Pakistani interlocutors, thereby neutralizing any leverage they perceived to have had during the negotiations?

While many of these questions remain unanswered for the time being, the announcement of Mullah Omar’s death will exacerbate tensions among competing factions within the Taliban and could potentially deteriorate into fratricidal war in Afghanistan.
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