...the capital of Afghanistan. Home to continuous fighting from 1992 to 1996 between the forces of would-be strongman and Pak ISI/Jamaat-e-Islami sock puppet Gulbuddin Hekmayar and the Northern Alliance, a period which won Hek the title
Most Evil Man in the Worldand didn't do much for the reputations of the Northern Alliance guys either....
21 years or so ago was viewed with pride in Pakistain as a considerable military success, and at least a section of the khaki establishment had no intention of abandoning its Afghan assets despite the post-9/11 exigencies. Its possible role in formulating a strategy for the period that began with the departure of most Western forces is inevitably unclear, but there are legitimate questions to be asked and it's hardly illogical for suspicions to arise.
One obvious question is how key figures in the Pakistain intelligence hierarchy could possibly have been unaware of Omar's demise -- even if he didn't, as Afghan intelligence sources claim, die in a Bloody Karachi
...formerly the capital of Pakistain, now merely its most important port and financial center. It is among the largest cities in the world, with a population of 18 million, most of whom hate each other and many of whom are armed and dangerous...
hospital. And if it was a calculated conspiracy of silence, were any other interested parties -- such as the CIA, for instance -- complicit in it?
Similar questions arose, of course, after the late Osama bin Laden
... who is now sometimes referred to as
Mister Bones...
was hunted down in his home near the Kakul military academy outside Abbottabad
... A pleasant city located only 30 convenient miles from Islamabad. The city is noted for its nice weather and good schools. It is the site of Pakistain's military academy, which was within comfortable walking distance of the residence of the late Osama bin Laden....
more than four years ago, and they are yet to be convincingly answered. It appears, meanwhile, that even Al Qaeda's leadership was unaware of Omar's fate, given that Ayman al-
Zawahiri... Formerly second in command of al-Qaeda, now the head cheese, occasionally described as
the real brains of the outfit.Formerly the Mister Big of Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Bumped off Abdullah Azzam with a car boom in the course of one of their little disputes. Is thought to have composed bin Laden's fatwa entitled World Islamic Front Against Jews and Crusaders. Currently residing in the North Wazoo area. That is not a horn growing from the middle of his forehead, but a prayer bump, attesting to how devout he is...
re-pledged allegiance to him just last year.
But then again, who knows whether Zawahiri himself is alive? After all, not long after the Omar newsflash, it was reported that Jalaluddin Haqqani has also been dead for a year. His son Sirajuddin is purportedly one of Mansour's deputies. The Haqqanis are believed to have been particularly dear to the Paks, but there are contradictory reports about where Mansour stands in this respect.
The latter's belligerent statements belie his reputation as a relatively moderate Talib -- although that doesn't mean very much in the context of violent extremism. But differences of opinion do matter and could have a significant impact on determining the future of Afghanistan.
Although even its modern roots go back a long way, the upsurge in Islamist extremism can be traced back to a series of unfortunate events in the late 1970s: General Zia ul Haq
...the creepy-looking former dictator of Pakistain. Zia was an Islamic nutball who imposed his nutballery on the rest of the country with the enthusiastic assistance of the nation's religious parties, which are populated by other nutballs. He was appointed Chief of Army Staff in 1976 by Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, whom he hanged when he seized power. His time in office was a period of repression, with hundreds of thousands of political rivals, minorities, and journalists executed or tortured, including senior general officers convicted in coup-d'état plots, who would normally be above the law. As part of his alliance with the religious parties, his government helped run the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, providing safe havens, American equipiment, Saudi money, and Pak handlers to selected mujaheddin. Zia died along with several of his top generals and admirals and the then United States Ambassador to Pakistain Arnold Lewis Raphel when he was assassinated in a suspicious air crash near Bahawalpur in 1988...'s military coup in Pakistain, the communist takeover in Kabul (which was followed less than two years later by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan), and the advent of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's regime in Tehran.
The well-funded mujahideen rebellion in Afghanistan sowed the seeds for much of what has transpired thereafter, including Taliban rule (and subsequent insurgency, which inevitably spilled over into Pakistain), and the role played across the Middle East (and beyond) by returnees from the Afghan jihad. The US played a primary role in propelling that jihad, and then was surprised -- even hurt -- by the blowback.
It stupidly waded back into the miasma and compounded its folly by invading Iraq, helping to create the conditions that facilitated the emergence of Daesh or the self-styled Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling
Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not
reallyMoslems....
(IS). Last Saturday marked the first anniversary of its anti-IS intervention, and there's little to show for it thus far beyond a mounting corpse count.
There have been reports in recent months of small groups of Taliban drifting into IS, which has already displaced Al Qaeda as the go-to one-stop-shop for fulfilling 'jihadist' fantasies; disarray among the former followers of Mullah Omar
... a minor Pashtun commander in the war against the Soviets who made good as leader of the Taliban. As ruler of Afghanistan, he took the title
Leader of the Faithful. The imposition of Pashtunkhwa on the nation institutionalized ignorance and brutality in a country already notable for its own fair share of ignorance and brutality...
can only facilitate its inroads into Afghanistan and, sooner or later, Pakistain.
There is certainly no cause to mourn Omar's demise, but nor is there any obvious reason to assume that his absence opens up pathways to peace.