SPY EYES

Will the United States be able to negotiate with a man it has hunted for a decade?

ABSTRACT: PROFILE of Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar. During his reign as the Amir of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, from 1994 to 2001, Mullah Mohammad Omar made a mark on the architecture of Kandahar, an irrigated desert city of about a half a million people in the south of the country. The Amir’s most ambitious project was a mosque and shopping center downtown called the Jamia Omar. Construction was under way when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan and forced Omar into hiding. Last year, American military commanders allocated funds to help President Hamid Karzai’s government complete the Jamia Omar. The decision reflected recent American counterinsurgency strategy in the war. In 2009, President Obama ordered thirty thousand additional troops to Afghanistan in an effort to break the Taliban’s reviving rebellion. Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban, has been a focus of the campaign. Mentions Mohammad Nasim Ziayi. In December, 2001, as Taliban control over Afghanistan collapsed, Mullah Mohammad Omar left Kandahar and reportedly crossed into Pakistan. Of the jihadi leaders who entered into international consciousness after 2001, Omar’s life remains the least well documented. He has not issued videotaped speeches over the Internet, as Al Qaeda’s leaders have done. More than half a dozen American officials the writer spoke with said that Omar is almost certainly in Pakistan and under some form of monitoring by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence directorate. There’s no question that the I.S.I. played a major role in funding and arming the Taliban during the movement’s rise to power in Afghanistan, in the nineteen-nineties, and maintained close contacts with Mullah Omar throughout that period. After September 11th, Pakistan allowed former Taliban leaders to take refuge on its soil. More recently, Pakistan’s security services have seemed to reinforce their ties to the Afghan Taliban leadership in anticipation of the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan. There are an estimated twenty-five thousand armed insurgents in Afghanistan, with differing degrees of loyalty to the Afghan Taliban and to a separate chapter growing inside Pakistan. No other Taliban leader issues strategic directions or articulates the war’s cause as Omar does. That is why the Obama Administration regards him as a critical figure in its efforts to organize peace talks between the Taliban and the Karzai regime. Describes Omar’s childhood and background, and how he met Osama bin Laden in the fall of 1996. Bin Laden moved his family to Kandahar, pledged loyalty to the Amir, accepted Taliban hospitality, and began to organize training camps. By 2004, Omar had reorganized the Taliban’s military and political command from inside Pakistan. Mentions Abdul Ghani Baradar and General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. Taliban insurgents and suicide bombers are today responsible for three-quarters of the civilian casualties in Afghanistan’s war. The fear is that America’s departure will lead to a resurgence of a Taliban movement that has not been eliminated after ten years of war.

The New Yorker