The Hits and Misses of Targeting the Taliban

The American killing by drone strike of Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, the leader of the Afghan Taliban, may seem like a fillip for the United States’ ally, the embattled government of President Ashraf Ghani. But it is unlikely to improve Kabul’s immediate national security problems, and may create more difficulties than it solves.

This raises doubts about the American approach — the so-called decapitation strategy — in carrying out such targeted killings against the Taliban leadership.

Commenting on the death of Mullah Mansour during his visit to Vietnam this week, President Obama said, “Mansour rejected efforts by the Afghan government to seriously engage in peace talks and end the violence that has taken the lives of countless innocent Afghan men, women and children.”

So runs the official line from the White House: Because Mullah Mansour became opposed to negotiations, removing him became necessary for new peace talks. Yet the notion that the United States can drone-strike its way through the leadership of the Afghan Taliban until it finds an acceptable interlocutor seems optimistic, at best.

The revelation, last July, of the 2013 death in Pakistan of the Afghan Taliban’s previous leader and founder, Mullah Muhammad Omar, led to a competition for the succession that hurt the group’s willingness and capacity to negotiate. The Taliban’s subsequent military push has been its strongest in a decade, causing thousands of civilian casualties. In particular, suicide bombings by the Taliban’s most dangerous and violent faction, the Haqqani network, have struck at the heart of the nation’s capital.

Facing this onslaught, the whole country has been plunged into insecurity. The struggling Afghan National Security Forces have been hanging on, but the military momentum is on the Taliban’s side.

In quickly announcing on Wednesday that Mawlawi Haibatullah Akhundzada, a deputy to Mullah Mansour, would be their new leader, the Taliban is trying to avoid the chaos that surrounded Mr. Omar’s succession and to keep their military momentum. It’s likely the violence will continue.

The situation for President Ghani is grave, and Mullah Mansour’s death will not change that. The president staked the first two years of his term on a mission of outreach to Pakistan, believing this would produce negotiations with the Taliban and a reduction in violence. Mr. Ghani also hoped that China could sway Pakistan to bring Taliban leaders to the negotiating table, and to end the Taliban’s access to safe havens in Pakistan, especially for the Haqqani network.

The president’s efforts came to naught — perhaps unsurprisingly, as the United States itself has, since 2001, failed to prevail on Pakistan to clamp down on the Afghan insurgents. While Mr. Ghani spent a great deal of political capital on this unproductive cause, his government was paralyzed by a schism between the president and his 2014 electoral rival, Abdullah Abdullah, the administration’s “chief executive” under the postelection power-sharing deal.

Mr. Ghani’s government has not delivered on promises to reduce corruption and create jobs. Politicians seeking patronage appointments block progress with their brinkmanship and stratagems. The former president Hamid Karzai is blatantly scheming to bring the government down, arguing that the Ghani administration’s mandate expires in September when a loya jirga assembly (a grand council of delegates) should create a new government.

The disruption of the Taliban’s leadership and a new round of succession struggles could produce even more infighting than occurred after Mullah Omar’s death. Some units might turn on one another; others might rebrand themselves as Islamic State fighters.

But tensions within the Taliban will not automatically strengthen the position of government forces or guarantee less violence. The fragmentation that followed Mullah Omar’s death last summer did not prevent a surge in conflict in which the Taliban scored a number of tactical victories against the Afghan forces. A decade of American decapitations of middle-level Taliban commanders has not broken the group.

The killing of Mullah Mansour pushes back the still-distant prospect of peace negotiations. Mawlawi Haibatullah is unlikely to be in a position to negotiate for some considerable time, since he will be struggling to gain control. Mullah Mansour himself was a pragmatic operator, skilled at co-opting or neutralizing his rivals, and it still took him about a year to reconsolidate the group. And in doing so, he empowered the Haqqani network.

The Haqqanis’ greater influence within the Taliban bodes ill for negotiations or any reduction in fighting. This would have been true even if the succession had gone to Mullah Muhammad Yaqoub, Mullah Omar’s oldest son, rather than to the bloodthirsty network leader Sirajuddin Haqqani (they were both announced by the Taliban on Wednesday as deputies to Mawlawi Haibatullah).

The American-backed counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan implies two theories of an eventual endgame: The first is to hang on until the Taliban implode through internal strife, perhaps encouraged by the targeted killings of their leaders; the second is to hang on until the Taliban are willing to negotiate some tolerable power-sharing arrangement. At best, there is no immediate prospect of the first outcome, while the second one has been brought no closer by the killing of Mullah Mansour.

The United States may also have had a geopolitical purpose in killing Mullah Mansour. Despite conditions imposed by Congress on American military aid that Pakistan must act against Afghan insurgents in its territory, the Pakistani military has showed little inclination to take on the Afghan Taliban or the Haqqanis. (Its primary objective is to prevent these groups from turning against the Pakistani state and allying with the Pakistani Taliban.) So, despite disavowals by Pakistani officials that the Afghan Taliban and Haqqani leaders are no longer in Pakistan, Mullah Mansour was killed in Baluchistan, Pakistan. This first lethal drone strike by the United States in that province was a strong signal to Pakistan, as well as the Taliban.

Delivering that message has come at a price. Killing Mullah Mansour has only made peace talks with the Afghan Taliban more remote. Decapitation by drone strike to disrupt the group’s leadership is a tempting military tool, but seen through the political lens on which any negotiations and reconciliation will ultimately depend, it can be too blunt an instrument.

Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, is the author of Aspiration and Ambivalence: Strategies and Realities of Counterinsurgency and State Building in Afghanistan.

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