As President Obama delivers some “Tough Love” to visiting Pakistani officials, including Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, one has to imagine Mullah Omar’s name has come up multiple times.
As regular readers of the BIG sites know, we broke the exclusive story back in May that the Taliban leader had been taken into custody by Pakistani authorities, specifically their Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI.
On Tuesday, the New York Times ran an article headlined: Taliban Elite, Aided by NATO, Join Talks for Afghan Peace. In it they write:
Though there is some disagreement among Afghan officials, many regard Mullah Omar as essentially a prisoner of the Pakistani security establishment who would be unable to exercise any independence.
This broadens Newsweek magazine’s piece from August, This Mullah Omar Show in which they state:
…[S]ome senior [Taliban] commanders worry that the ISI may be holding Omar prisoner and issuing self-serving orders in his name.
It’s more than just “some” senior Taliban commanders. In fact, it’s an open secret that Pakistan is holding Mullah Omar in order to influence the peace talks.
So how exactly are those “peace talks” going? Well that depends on who you consider empowered to speak on the Taliban’s behalf.
According to Peshawar-based journalist Mushtaq Yusufzai, whose writing was picked up Wednesday in The Daily Beast, the right high-level Taliban are not only not at the table, they have no interest in peace talks whatsoever:
Mulla Munibullah, a Taliban commander who oversees operations in the Kunar and Nuristan provinces, said any faction or commander negotiating with the Karzai administration, without prior approval of Taliban’s governing Shura, would be classified as an enemy of the Taliban. The militant group, he added, would not stop fighting until every single foreign soldier currently present in Afghanistan is gone. Any effort by the American or Afghan governments to parts of the Taliban without the consent of the supreme leader Mullah Omar would be a futile exercise, he added.
Which brings us back to Obama, the Pakistanis, and tough love. All of the key players know the ISI has Omar. In fact, negotiating without him is like trying to bake a cake with one of the main ingredients missing. You may be able to cover up the end result with lots of frosting, but nobody is going to want to eat it.
Mullah Omar, like the Pakistani ISI, is a cancer that has sickened the entire nation of Afghanistan, and is rapidly dragging down Pakistan. The best thing that could happen for both nations is for Omar to “fall” down a flight of stairs, or better yet catch a hellfire missile while sipping his chai.
In fact, if it could be arranged, the best thing for Afghanistan and Pakistan would actually be to have the hellfire arrive right as Omar is pouring tea for the entire ISI command structure. Now that’d be the way to show the Pakistanis some “tough love.”
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