On the eve of President Barack Hussein Obama’s announcement of troop levels in Afghanistan next week, his enemy Mullah Mohammad Omar has thrown down the gauntlet. In a major message to mark the Muslim holiday of Eid al Adha this week, the commander of the Afghan Taliban addressed “the rulers of the White House” about their plans to increase troop numbers in Afghanistan and to pursue “illogical strategies” that he promises will only lead to “bitterness and pain.” The self-styled Amir of Believers, meaning the commander of all the faithful in Islam, tells Obama that he and the Afghan people are experts in defeating empires, having destroyed the English and Russian empires before the invasion of the “imperialistic American crusaders.” In short, Omar welcomes the coming fight with a larger NATO army, and he lays down in this message his no-compromise strategy for victory.
A man educated only in the strictest of fundamentalist Islamic schooling, Mullah Omar has developed a more complex understanding of his enemies in the last year.
To give him his due, Mullah Omar has staged one of the most remarkable military comebacks in history in the last decade. Utterly defeated in late 2001, he retreated into the mountains of southern Afghanistan and the borderlands with Pakistan to regroup. Thanks to George Bush’s failure to finish the job then, the Taliban recovered and now controls much of the south and east of the country and is attacking deeper into the north and west every day. With the benefit of a sanctuary in Pakistan, Omar now believes the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan will be restored to power in the next couple of years.
He is a remarkably secretive man who has met with less than a handful of non-Muslims in his life and prides himself on his piety and simple life. Badly wounded fighting the Soviets, he practices remarkable operational security. His location is a closely guarded secret; reports recently put him in Karachi to escape CIA drones. Normally taciturn, his Eid message is his longest ever, a reflection of the importance of the moment.
Omar begins by rejecting any offer of negotiations from the Kabul government. He calls President Hamid Karzai a stooge of America and warns all his captains to avoid any discussion with the collaborators in Kabul unless it is to speed their defections. Omar has consistently rejected negotiations with Karzai, and he notes Karzai’s recent reelection was marred by massive corruption and vote fraud. Then Omar urges all the educated and literary of Afghanistan to rally behind the Taliban mujahedin. He warns Afghanistan’s neighbors that collaboration with NATO today will come home to haunt them later once the Taliban have triumphed—a clear warning that the Taliban intend to export their revolution if they succeed.
At the end of the message he appeals to the entire Islamic community to join in the jihad against America. He lauds the mujahedin fighters in Iraq, Palestine and other countries fighting America, thus associating himself with the global Islamic jihad movement. Omar has done this in previous Eid messages but more forcefully than ever this year. This message combines both a powerful Afghan nationalist statement with a universal Islamic jihad theme in a way designed to portray the Taliban as both an anti-colonial nationalist movement and a part of the larger jihad against the Crusader Americans. This may be a response to criticisms of an earlier message this fall that seemed more nationalist than jihadist. Omar is saying he is both. He is appealing to the broadest base he can.
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Nice. Woderful. SPECTACULAR. Bring our men and women home NOW.
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