By IANS
Kabul/New Delhi: The killing of Mullah Dadullah, Taliban chief Mullah Omar’s long-serving chief strategist and army commander, if true, is a major gain scored in the ongoing international campaign against terrorism in Afghanistan.
It indicates that the military campaign by the Karzai government in Kabul and NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), involving an estimated 20,000 Western soldiers, is beginning to bear fruit.
The element of doubt persists about Dadullah being killed, claimed by an officer of the National Directorate of Security on Sunday, because Dadullah had been reported killed and captured in the past as well.
Almost a year ago, quoting Afghan government sources, the BBC reported on May 19, 2006, that the Western forces in Afghanistan had captured Dadullah in the Kandahar area. There was no official confirmation and the Taliban later denied the claim. Dadullah was free and remained in charge of the operations.
The 39-year-old Mulla Dadullah is a Pakistani national belonging to the Kakar tribe of Balochistan. A product of one of the Islamic seminaries of Balochistan, he joined one of the Afghan Mujahideen groups as a teenager in the 1980s and distinguished himself in the jihad against the Soviet troops, despite losing a leg.
Dadullah has had a long record of association with the Pakistan Army. His is the same tribe to which Gen. Abdul Waheed Kakar, who was the army chief during the second tenure of Benazir Bhutto as the prime minister (1993-96) belonged.
His role goes back to the formation of the Taliban militia in 1994. When Mulla Omar formed it at the instance of Maj. Gen. Naserullah Babar, Bhutto’s interior minister, to escort the cotton convoys of her husband Asif Zardari, from Turkmenistan to Pakistan through the Herat area of Afghanistan, Dadullah joined it. Eventually, he rose to be its Chief Military Commander.
He held this post when the US military struck against the Taliban and Al Qaeda on Oct 7, 2001. Ousted from power in Kabul, Dadulah and Mulla Omar crossed over to Balochistan and took shelter with the Kakar tribe.
In 2003, when Mulla Omar reconstituted the militia, Dadullah was again appointed its head. Noted Indian strategic expert B. Raman believes that this was because Dadullah had continued to enjoy the confidence of Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI).
The new Taliban army was trained by the ISI and started operating in the Pashtun majority areas of Southern and Eastern Afghanistan from sanctuaries in Balochistan and in the Waziristan area of the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), Raman says.
Within a short period, Dadullah raised not only a well-motivated army, that security experts call “neo-Taliban”, but also constituted a suicide squad of Afghan and Pakistani nationals for undertaking suicide missions against the Afghan army and the Western forces.
The total strength of the Neo Taliban army raised by him with the help of the ISI is estimated by Western sources as about 5,000, but Dadullah has claimed a strength of 20,000.
Dadullah repeatedly denied any Pakistani role in the activities of the Neo Taliban, but claimed close links with Al Qaida. He despised the Musharraf regime for having “betrayed” the Taliban cause and having joined the “non-Muslim” Americans.
In December 2005 a Pakistani court sentenced him to life in prison for trying to kill conservative Islamic politician Maulana Mohammad Khan Sherani in 2004. Sherani escaped unhurt, Pakistani journal ‘Newsline’ said in its October 2003 issue.
However, Dadullah, highly respected among the Kakar tribals, continued to move around Balochistan, recruiting local youths and the Afghan refugees in camps in and around Quetta, for his militia that are involved in the current operations in Afghanistan.