The May 21 drone strike that killed Taliban leader Akhtar Mohammad Mansoor
was no ordinary assassination; it was an act of armed politics against
an acutely political war strategist. The Taliban has already named
Mansoor’s successor, Mawlawi Haibatullah Akhundzada,
and is reassuring its members that the status quo will endure—but
Mansoor kept a steady hand on the tiller and, now he’s gone, the
movement could struggle to hold the line.
Mansoor set the tone for a particular approach to the Afghan and
Pakistani governments, one that endures today. For over a year, the
United States has backed the efforts of Afghanistan’s President Ashraf
Ghani to persuade the Pakistani government to bring the Taliban to the
negotiating table. Mansoor was the architect of the Taliban’s response
to these overtures, which ranged from obfuscation to downright
rejection.
Much of this was directed against U.S.-backed Pakistani officials,
whom Mansoor treated to a string of excuses, delays, and platitudes.
These ultimately boiled down to the message that he was not ready to
negotiate.
By the time the Taliban announced its 2016 spring offensive,
pretty much all analysts had concluded that Mansoor had simply been
playing for time, banking on being able to make military progress in
Afghanistan without negotiations, while trying not to provoke Pakistan
into denying the Taliban access to their undeclared safe haven there.
During the stand-off, as Taliban representatives repeatedly explained
their unavailability for talks, they consistently invoked Mansoor’s
authority. On the big issues of war and peace, he was the only empowered
figure in the movement. And yet, after an initial period when he made
himself visible in meetings, Mansoor spent most of his leadership out of
sight, and therefore unable to participate in any meaningful debate in
the movement.
One of the main reasons for this was his brinkmanship with Pakistan
and the United States. He may not have expected to be killed by a U.S.
drone strike well inside Pakistan, but he certainly worried about a
clampdown by the Pakistani authorities and wanted to stay ahead of them.
This was not the approach of a garden-variety guerrilla fighter. To
appreciate just how much of a political and military strategist Mansoor
was, you have to examine his record of dealing with internal dissent.
Running the Show
In retrospect, Mansoor was remarkably successful. While the Taliban
did formally splinter for the first time under his stewardship—when the
Mohammad Rasool group was formed—Mansoor relentlessly pressured this
faction and rounded up its dissidents. In the period when he was still
attending meetings, he tried to sweet talk estranged members of the
movement into taking an oath of allegiance; after that, he depended on
his aides to woo pretty much any senior veteran of the movement who had
not accepted his leadership.
But where sweet talking did not work, Mansoor readily deployed
Taliban columns against recalcitrant commanders. He had Commander Mansoor Dadaullah killed, and effectively wiped out a small faction of Uzbek extremists whom Dadaullah had sheltered.
For months, pro-Mansoor commanders have been involved in armed clashes in Afghanistan’s Herat and Farah provinces with fighters from Rasool‘s
splinter group. Mansoor successfully projected the message that any
rebellion against him, the Taliban’s lawful emir, would be dealt with
sternly.
Over the past year, there has been a big gap between the internal
politics of Mansoor’s Taliban and the peace agenda which the Kabul
government and its allies have tried to advance. The Taliban’s politics
revolved around Mansoor’s attempts to consolidate his hold over the
movement—and he used his authority to keep the Taliban focused on the
war effort. The movement never had a meaningful internal debate about
the possibility of peace.
Marching On
And so the Taliban enters a new era. It considers its Islamic emirate
to be a system of government and, even before the leadership publicly
acknowledged Mansoor’s death, the message to cadres was that there will
be continuity: the system will survive, so carry on doing whatever you
are doing. The incoming leader, Akhundzada, will be expected to sustain
the structures, political practices, and dogma that Mansoor helped to
build up.
Initially at least, this means maintaining the Taliban’s committed
jihadist image, raising whatever funds possible, keeping up the military
campaign in Afghanistan, and rewarding loyal and obedient supporters
with positions in the hierarchy. The movement will keep looking for any
state or non-state actor prepared to back it.
But it remains to be seen if the movement will or even can stay the
same. While Mansoor successfully steered Taliban politics towards
consolidation of his authority, 2015–2016 was still the movement’s most
intensely political year yet, and the succession and its aftermath will
trigger another round of internal politicking of the sort Mansoor had
just about kept in check.
Whatever Taliban doctrine says about the continuity of authority,
Afghan politics involves intricate maneuvers between competing networks,
each seeking to take advantage of the elevation of a kinsman or fellow
tribe member. Replacing the leader will force the movement’s informal
networks into some sort of realignment. But things are going to get
shaken up, and somewhere along the way the movement’s members are going
to question the absence of debate—and maybe even the long war strategy
itself.
Mansoor’s real problem was that he believed in the military campaign
but lacked the means to win it. He did not live to see the failure of
his strategy, and others are bound to start questioning it. And so
begins the next chapter of the Taliban’s armed politics.
Michael Semple is a visiting research professor at the Institute
for the Study of Conflict Transformation and Social Justice at Queen’s
University Belfast in the U.K. This article was originally published on The Conversation.
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