Frontline Pakistan : The Struggle With Militant Islam - Arz-e-Pak

Frontline Pakistan
In a last-ditch attempt to put off a US attack on Afghanistan, and
the backlash it would provoke, General Musharraf dispatched General
Mamhood to Kandahar on 17 September to persuade Mullah Omar to
hand bin Laden over to the USA. ‘I was trying to drill home to him that
he shouldn’t make the people of Afghanistan suffer for a person who’s
not even an Afghan, but someone who’s come from outside,’ General
Musharraf said. 19
When the Saudi fugitive had first settled in Afghanistan in the 1990s
after his expulsion from Sudan, relations between him and Mullah
Omar were not cordial. Mullah Omar would often call him ‘donkey’
and make fun of bin Laden among his fellows. The Taliban leader
would argue that he had inherited the Saudi militant and had to treat
him as a guest and protect him according to Pashtun tradition. ‘He is
like chicken bone stuck in our throat,’ he once told a senior Pakistani
diplomat. 20 . The Taliban and al-Qaeda were very different in their aims
and political and religious philosophy. The Taliban represented an
ultra-conservative society; their agenda was Afghan-specific. Before
11 September, the USA was not their number one enemy. Al-Qaeda,
on the other hand, had a wider international agenda. Its main objective
was to attack US interests wherever possible. Its cadres were not
necessarily orthodox religious people.
Over the years, bin Laden had expanded his influence as the
conservative Islamic forces became increasingly reliant on his
financial support and foreign fighters to extend control over the rest
of Afghanistan. There was a visible hardening in Mullah Omar’s stance
with the improvement in relations with his guest.
Islamabad seemed to be losing whatever clout it had on the Islamic
fundamentalist regime. Mullah Omar was not prepared to listen to
his patrons anymore. The biggest embarrassment came in early
2001 when the he snubbed Musharraf’s Interior Minister, Moinuddin
Haider, who sought the extradition of leaders of a Pakistani sectarian
group who had taken refuge in Afghanistan. They were wanted in
several cases of murder and attacks on Shia mosques. 21 The worst
snub came in March 2001, when Mullah Omar rejected Pakistan’s
request not to obliterate statues of Buddha in Bamiyan. Pakistan had
tried to use the Taliban and al-Qaeda to promote its influence in wartorn
Afghanistan – only to eventually lose control over both of them.
Despite international outrage and dissent within their own ranks,
hardline Taliban extremists systematically destroyed Afghanistan’s
pre-Islamic heritage. 22