Taliban leader's rebound tests U.S.

WASHINGTON — In late 2001, Mullah Muhammad Omar's prospects seemed bleak. The ill-educated, one-eyed leader of the Taliban had fled on a motorbike after his fighters were swiftly routed by the Americans invading Afghanistan.

Much of the world celebrated his ouster, and Afghans cheered the return of girls' education, music and ordinary pleasures outlawed by the grim fundamentalist government.

Eight years later, Omar is the leader of an insurgency that has gained steady ground in much of Afghanistan against much better equipped U.S. and NATO forces. He represents a vexing security challenge for the Obama administration, one that has consumed the president's advisers, divided the Democratic Party and left many Americans frustrated.

"This is an amazing story," said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer who coordinated the Obama administration's initial review of Afghanistan policy in the spring. "He's a semiliterate individual who has met with no more than a handful of non-Muslims in his entire life. And he's staged one of the most remarkable military comebacks in modern history."

U.S. officials are weighing the significance of this comeback: Is Omar the brains behind shrewd shifts of Taliban tactics and propaganda in recent years, or does he have help from Pakistani intelligence? Might the Taliban be amenable to negotiations, as Omar hinted in a Sept. 19 statement, or can his network be divided and weakened in some other way? Or is the Taliban's total defeat required to ensure Afghanistan will never again become a haven for al-Qaida?

The search for answers will figure in the discussions as President Obama and his advisers debate whether to substantially increase U.S. forces in Afghanistan or to conduct a more limited campaign focused on targeting al-Qaida figures, most of whom are believed to be in neighboring Pakistan.

The man at the center of the U.S. policy conundrum remains a mystery, the subject of adoring mythmaking by his followers and guesswork by the world's intelligence agencies. He was born, by various accounts, in 1950 or 1959 or 1960 or 1962. He may be hiding near Quetta, Pakistan, or hunkered down in an Afghan village. No one is sure.

"He can't operate openly; there are too many people looking for him," and the eye he lost to Soviet shrapnel in the 1980s makes him recognizable, said Alex Strick van Linschoten, a Dutch-born writer who lives in Kandahar, where Omar's movement was born, and who has helped a former Taliban official write a memoir.

"There are four or five people who can pass messages to Omar," Strick van Linschoten said. "And then there's a circle of people who can get access to those four or five people."

"Man of few words"

Rahimullah Yusufzai, of The News International, a Pakistani newspaper, who interviewed Omar a dozen times before 2001, called him "a man of few words and not very knowledgeable about international affairs." But his reputed humility, his legend as a ferocious fighter with the mujahedeen against Soviet invaders in the 1980s, and his success in ending the lawlessness and bloody warlords' feuds of the early-1990s cemented his power.

"His followers adore him, believe in him and are willing to die for him," Yusufzai said. While even Taliban officials rarely see him, Omar "remains an inspiration, sending out letters and audiotapes to his commanders and fighters," the journalist said.

A recent assessment by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, identified the Taliban as the most important part of the insurgency, coordinating "loosely" with groups led by two prominent warlords. The general concluded that "the insurgents currently have the initiative" and "the overall situation is deteriorating."

A statement from Omar, one of a series issued in his name on each of the two annual Eid holidays, offered a remarkably similar analysis. He, or his ghostwriter, praised the success of "the gallant mujahedeen" in countering the "sophisticated and cutting-edge technology" of the enemy, saying the Taliban movement "is approaching the edge of victory."

For a recluse, he showed a keen awareness of Western public opinion, touching on the history that haunts foreign armies in Afghanistan ("We fought against the British invaders for 80 years"), denouncing fraud in the recent presidential election and asking of the U.S.-led forces, "Have they achieved anything in the past eight years?"

"A centrifugal force"

U.S. military and intelligence analysts say the Taliban have achieved some things. They describe today's Afghan Taliban as a franchise operation, a decentralized network of fighters with varying motivations, united by hostility toward the Afghan government and foreign forces and by loyalty to Omar.

The Taliban have deployed fighters in small guerrilla units and stepped up the use of suicide bombings and improvised explosive devices. The movement has expanded military operations from the Taliban's southern stronghold into the north and west of the country, forcing NATO to spread its troops more thinly.

Day-to-day decisions are made by Omar's deputies, in particular Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a skilled, pragmatic commander who runs many meetings with Taliban commanders and "shadow governors" appointed in much of the country, analysts say.

Omar heads the Taliban's Rahbari Shura, or leadership council, often called the Quetta Shura since it relocated to the Pakistani city in 2002. The shura, consisting of the Taliban commanders, "operates like the Politburo of a communist party," setting broad strategy, said Yusufzai, the Pakistani journalist. McChrystal wrote in his assessment that the shura "conducts a formal campaign review each winter, after which Omar announces his guidance and intent for the coming year."

Thomas Gouttierre, director of the Center for Afghanistan Studies at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, said that "as a symbolic figure, Omar is a centrifugal force for the Taliban," playing a similar role to that of Osama bin Laden in al-Qaida. But Gouttierre credits the Taliban's success not to any military genius on the part of Omar but to more worldly advisers from Pakistan's intelligence service and al-Qaida.

Link to al-Qaida

Taliban folklore tells of Omar's bravery in the 1980s in removing his own injured eye and fighting on; of his dream in the mid-1990s in which the Prophet Muhammad told him he would bring peace to Afghanistan; and of how in 1996, he donned a cloak reputed to have belonged to the prophet and took the title "commander of the faithful."

That was the year bin Laden moved his base to Afghanistan. Ever since, the central question about Omar for U.S. officials has been his relationship with al-Qaida.

In 1998, two days after U.S. cruise missiles hit an al-Qaida training camp in an unsuccessful attempt to kill bin Laden, Omar telephoned an astonished State Department official, Michael Malinowski, who took the call on his porch at 2:30 a.m. Omar demanded proof that the al-Qaida leader was involved in terrorism, according to declassified records. (Omar also suggested that to improve U.S. relations with Muslim countries, President Clinton should step down.)

Bin Laden courted the Taliban leader, vowing allegiance and calling the far less educated man a historic leader of Islam. A letter of advice from bin Laden to Omar on Oct. 3, 2001, found on an al-Qaida computer obtained by The Wall Street Journal, heaped on the praise ("I would like to emphasize how much we appreciate the fact that you are our emir").

Despite intense pressure from the United States and its allies to turn over bin Laden, Omar declined, and paid a steep price when the Taliban fell.

Richard Barrett, a former British intelligence officer now monitoring al-Qaida and the Taliban for the United Nations, argues that Omar has learned the lesson of 2001. If the Taliban regain power, he said, "they don't want al-Qaida hanging around. They want to be able to say, 'We are a responsible government.' "

In his Sept. 19 statement, Omar made such an assertion: "We assure all countries that the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, as a responsible force, will not extend its hand to cause jeopardy to others."

Riedel, who helped devise the Afghanistan strategy now being rethought, scoffs at such pronouncements as "clever propaganda."

"We've been trying for 13 years to get the Taliban to break with al-Qaida and turn over bin Laden, and they haven't done it," Riedel said. "Whatever the bond is between them, it's stood the test of time."

Material from The Associated Press is included in this report.