Daily Times

The Taliban have carried out many remarkably vicious attacks in Kabul in recent days, claiming many innocent lives. These attacks may be an apparent attempt by Taliban leaders to portray unity, boost the morale of cadres and to show that the jihad against government forces and their foreign backers continues despite internal chaos. The Taliban have been in turmoil since confirming that their leader, Mullah Omar, long hidden from the public eye, was dead. The death of Mullah Omar takes away the main centre of gravity in the jihadi movement that competes with Islamic State (IS), its rival now. The Taliban, since their inception, enjoyed the monopoly of being the only jihadist group but now it faces tough competition from IS. Many analysts believes Mullah Omar’s death poses an existential crisis for the Afghan Taliban potentially presaging a splintering of the movement as IS gains a toehold among insurgents enthralled by its battlefield prowess. The group has suffered a string of recent defections to IS, with some insurgents voicing disaffection with the current new Taliban leader, Mullah Mansoor, who is not at all ‘charismatic’ like Mullah Omar. Now the Taliban are feeling insecure. To unify the movement and the cadres, deadly attacks were carried out in the Afghan capital.
Mullah Omar’s death was a huge boon for the local branch of IS, which a Pentagon report in June said is in an initial, exploratory phase in Afghanistan. The Taliban are afraid of the potential rise of IS in Afghanistan as they know it will rise at the cost of the Taliban only if they fail to project unity, soon becoming irrelevant. The Taliban and IS do not share much ideological ground. IS espouses a brand of Salafism at odds with the Hanafi school of Sunni Islam in Afghanistan and the groups have differing ambitions. The Taliban are focused on creating an Islamic state in Afghanistan with defined borders while IS is seeking to create a borderless mega-state spanning entire continents. Therefore, they both have conflicting interests and cannot survive simultaneously in the same area. The Taliban realises the importance of being united otherwise they will face extinction. That is why they are realigning themselves. The man replacing Omar, Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansoor, was Omar’s deputy and has been effectively leading the Taliban since Omar’s death, perhaps even before that. His selection seems to suggest that the Haqqani network, a faction that has gradually become powerful enough to rival the Quetta Shura within the Taliban, was willing to compromise on leadership, rather than pressing for Omar’s son, whom the Haqqanis were rumoured to favour.
The two deputies to Mansoor, however, are one of the leaders of the Haqqani network and a former Taliban judge who is said to be close to the Haqqanis. That signals a kind of grand compromise between the Quetta Shura and the Haqqanis who have struggled for dominance over the years. The most logical conclusion is that both the Quetta Shura and the Haqqanis have concluded that, at this moment, projecting Taliban unity is much more important than their squabbling. Further strengthening this interpretation is that the announcement seems to have been made in haste to gain much control, following immediately the public acknowledgment of Omar’s death. But another important faction among the Taliban consisting of Mullah Zakir, Mullah Yakoob (Mullah Omar’s eldest son), and Mullah Manan opposed this realignment of the Mullah Mansoor group and Haqqani network. So, the air is still not clear over the issue of new leadership. Mullah Mansoor, the new leader, is under pressure to deliver and boost the morale of loyal cadres.
Now the Taliban can see a potential cost associated with the slow collapse of the Afghan government and the country. Gradualism begets disorder, a power vacuum and internal Taliban strife. In other words, the longer it takes for the Ghani government to fall, the greater the chances for IS to undermine the Taliban. The Taliban want to avoid a situation in which, having won their long war against the US and its Afghan regime, they have to fight another civil war against an IS offshoot for control of the country. Hence, the new Taliban leadership wants to project itself hard on the battlefield and negotiate from a position of strength in the peace talks. But the Taliban have to rethink this strategy as with so much civilians casualties’ the Afghan government will be under intense pressure from civil society to stop all peace talks with the group and announce a full-fledged military operation against the Taliban. In that scenario, the equation for the Taliban will change drastically.

The author is a columnist for the Middle East and Af-Pak region and the editor of geo-political news agency ViewsAround. He can be reached at manishraiva@gmail.com