Usama bin Ladin’s “Father Sheikh”:

Mahmud to avoid acting until “the situation becomes clearer” 288 went unheeded.
Engineer Mahmud was soon killed, and by the time that the Taliban consolidated their
control in Nangarhar, Khalis’s view of the movement was already souring.
The vignettes recounted by Din Muhammad depict an increasingly acrimonious and
poisonous relationship between Khalis and various Taliban leaders. Din Muhammad
recalls several incidents of the Taliban reneging on agreements with Khalis, 289 and he
claims that Khalis broadly critiqued the Taliban’s heavy‐handed enforcement of
conservative interpretations of various religious and cultural traditions. 290 True, Din
Muhammad is not the best source for unbiased information about the Taliban; his
family is well‐known for its anti‐Taliban politics. 291 And even Din Muhammad notes
that Khalis was frequently consulted by the Taliban292 and that many of Khalis’s
acquaintances and friends were members of the movement. 293 But these connections and
consultations did not guarantee agreement, and Khalis was not a supporter of such
Taliban policies as enforcing beard length or interrupting critical agricultural work
during the call to prayer. 294 Although details about the nature of Khalis’s interactions
with Mullah Omar are slim, all of the available evidence indicates that the two men
were neither friends nor did they see eye to eye politically. 295
288 Ibid., 97.
289 Most significantly, Din Muhammad claims that the Taliban agreed not to attack Nangarhar: “Mawlawi
Sahib Khalis from time to time had relations with the Taliban’s base in Kandahar. They gave this very
same response that ‘there isn’t a program for Nangarhar, and where there is a program, we will take
relations with Mawlawi Khalis.’” This obviously did not work out. See ibid., 96. The year prior, the
Taliban had assured Khalis that the weapons depots in Ziruk operated by Mati’ullah Khan’s brother Haji
Sarfaraz were under no danger of attack. Even as negotiations were ongoing, the Taliban attacked these
depots and Sarfaraz lit them on fire before fleeing to Waziristan. See ibid., 87–88.
290 Muhammad (2007), 104–107. Here Khalis speaks up at a meeting in Kabul after Nabi Muhammadi
gave an unsatisfactory response to the Taliban representative. Khalis critiques the enforcement of
requirements for beard length and stopping to pray during harvest time when work needs to continue.
Brown and Rassler argue that the Haqqani leadership in Loya Paktia expressed similar misgivings,
especially with respect to the Taliban’s conservative policies regarding women. See Brown and Rassler,
108.
291 His brothers ‘Abd al‐Haq and ‘Abd al‐Qadir were most likely killed by groups affiliated with the
Taliban.
292 There are frequent discussions of Khalis visiting the Taliban leadership and of the Taliban consulting
Khalis for advice about various issues. See Muhammad (2007), 84–85, 87, 96, 101, 104–107 and 108‐110.
293 Ibid., 91–92.
294 Ibid., 104–107.
295 It is revelatory that we only have evidence of one conversation between Khalis and Mullah Omar in
the biographies. The other two times that Khalis attempted to speak with him, Mullah Omar either
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