Does the killing of Mullah Akhtar change US-Pakistan relations?

Shaukat Qadir offers a Pakistani point of view on recent events

An Afghan man reads a local newspaper with photos the former leader of the Afghan Taliban, Mullah Akhtar Mansoor, who was killed in a US drone strike last week. Rahmat Gul / AP

A lot has already been said about the death of Mullah Akhtar Mansour, the successor to Mullah Omar as head of the Afghan Taliban who was killed by a United States drone strike in Balochistan one week ago.

I intend to look at it from a Pakistani point of view.

The news was first announced by an American spokesman, later corroborated by Kabul, followed by a Taliban statement that was later retracted. The first official Pakistani response, from prime minister Nawaz Sharif and interior minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, was indignant. However, US secretary of state John Kerry immediately responded. He said, in effect, that Mr Sharif and the chief of army staff, Gen Raheel Sharif, knew about the attack.

It is noteworthy that there has been no statement from Pakistan’s official Inter Services Public Relations department.

Let us review the known facts.

When Mullah Omar’s death became public last year, there was considerable fighting within the Taliban to decide on his successor. Omar’s brother and son were both aspirants.

At the time, Mullah Akhtar was generally considered the least intractable of those competing for succession and he was finally selected by the Taliban Shura.

Perhaps due to the further splintering and infighting among the Taliban, he became increasingly uncompromising, and that explains why he was marked for death.

Mullah Akhtar apparently lived in Pakistan under another identity. He had a computerised national identity card (CNIC) and a passport as Wali Mohammed. The interior minister said that the CNIC was cancelled last year, but he couldn’t satisfactorily explain why the passport was not.

Mullah Akhtar was returning from a visit to his family in Iran – implying that he felt safer crossing back into Afghanistan from Pakistan than from Iran.

There are two broad methods of gathering intelligence: human and electronic. The latter has numerous subtypes. While the CIA is unmatched in electronic intelligence, it now has virtually no human intelligence capability of its own in Pakistan. For this, it is dependent on the cooperation of other intelligence agencies or on private companies such as XE Services.

After Pakistan jailed CIA contractor Raymond Davis for murder in 2011, the country seized the opportunity to get rid of the many private intelligence operators who had been let into the country during the Musharraf era in the 2000s. This deprived the CIA of its own human intelligence.

In 2012, Pakistan struck an agreement to cooperate and share intelligence with the US. Following that, the accuracy of targeted drone strikes increased manifold.

The US version of this latest attack is that the CIA zeroed in on Mullah Akhtar while he was visiting his family in Iran and, having acquired his “electronic signature”, stayed with him and targeted him after he crossed the border into Pakistan. The site selected was scarcely populated and distant enough for it to avoid immediate attention.

This all sounds totally plausible. But in doing so, the US broke what seems to have been a tacit agreement with Pakistan to refrain from drone strikes in that area. Of the hundreds of strikes until then, not one has been in Balochistan.

Why should the US choose to cross this red line, especially at a time when Pakistan seems to have regained some control over that vast province?

There are only two possibilities: either the US version is correct or it isn’t.

If it isn’t, then the hit was a set-up that was executed with Pakistani approval. That raises numerous questions, the foremost of which is: where is Pakistan headed with its Afghanistan and Taliban policy?

Also, was the hit meant to be a warning? If so, will it warn any future leader of the Afghan Taliban not to act against Pakistan’s wishes?

If the US deliberately waited to execute the hit in Balochistan, there are only two possible reasons for it to do so.

If the US could not wait for Mullah Akhtar to enter Afghanistan, where he might have been able to get away, it had the choice of irking one of two countries: Iran or Pakistan. The US chose not to risk Iran’s ire – emphasising the new American assessment of that country.

The alternative to this is that the US wanted to make two points: that there are no red lines for its drone strikes in Pakistan and that Balochistan’s stability is no longer a priority for the US.

In a previous article, I commented that Pakistan was no longer the target of a hybrid war by the US. I expressed the hope that this situation would last.

That hope may turn out to have been extremely short lived.

Brig Shaukat Qadir is a retired Pakistani infantry officer