Re-shaping the Taliban Leadership?

Sustaining “America’s War on Terrorism”

Obama's decision to suddenly free five of the most important Taliban members from Guantanamo Bay

By Umberto Pascali

Is this a way to send back to Afghanistan five top Taliban leaders who have been “re-conditioned” and “turned” in Guantanamo and are now working for the US? Is this a move against the “unloyal” President Karzai & his successors? The Taliban leadership has been, reportedly, decimated by the drones assassinations. It is not difficult to imagine what will happen with the arrival of five of the very top Taliban political leaders after many years of detention in Guantanamo: The creation of a new leadership. 

Why would the US do that after having spent so much money and blood trying to decapitate the Taliban elite and, reportedly, succeeding? You need terrorists to sustain the “war on terrorism”?


Officially, the sudden decision was taken by President Obama to rescue Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl who has been in the hands of the Taliban since 2009 and who allegedly left voluntarily to the point that many of his fellow colleague are accusing him of “desertion”. There are reports that Bergdhal did not want to leave his captivity.
If the reason of the exchange was to spare the sergeant further pain and suffering, or to give a signal that no US soldier is left behind — then why wasn’t Bergdhal freed before? Why are now – right now – the five Taliban leaders returned to an Afghanistan deprived of leaders?  Is there any connection with the increasing Afghanistan willingness to forge closer links with BRICS, China, and Russia? Is there any connection with the recently established good contacts between Pakistan and Russia to the point that Russia lifted his arms embargo on Pakistan immediately before the announced Five Taliban liberation? 

Is this a [desperate] way to keep some form of “strategic” presence in an area where both India and Pakistan are taking the distances from the Anglo-Americans and are looking at the BRICS instead? Is this a way to slow down the recognition that Brzezinski & Co. have lost Central Asia’s Great game?


Who are the Five Taliban?

The Freed Taliban are: Mullah Mohammad Fazl, Mullah Norullah Noori, Abdul Haq Wasiq, Khairullah Khairkhwa and Mohammed Nabi Omari. They were all top political leaders of the Taliban regime originally installed in Afghanistan with the US help.
Actually, one of them - Abdul Haq Wasiq - has been reportedly working for the US forces since US invasion in 2001. He was deputy minister of intelligence, while his cousin was the head of intelligence.

Wasiq was the deputy chief of the Taliban regime’s intelligence service. His cousin was head of the service Reportedly Wasiq cooperated with U.S. forces in Afghanistan promising he would lead to the capture of Taliban Supreme Leader Mullah Muhammad Omar. In a meeting with US representatives he asked for a global positioning system (GPS) and the necessary radio frequencies to pass information back to the Americans in order to help locate the Taliban leader. Strangely enough, shortly after the meeting, US forces arrested him. (https://wikileaks.org/gitmo/pdf/af/us9af-000004dp.pdf)
An administrative review in 2007 cited a source as saying that Wasiq was also “an al Qaeda intelligence member” and had links with members of another militant Islamist group, Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin. Wasiq claimed, according to the review, that he was arrested while trying to help the United States locate senior Taliban figures. He denied any links to militant groups. (http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/31/us/bergdahl-transferred-guantanamo-detainees/)

Another of the Guantanamo prisoners - Khairullah Khairkhwa  - is the former Interior Minister and the former Taliban governor of Heart, was considered by the Pentagon’s 2008 dossier to be one of the controllers of the heroin traffic.

The young Khairkhwa  had been trained during the US sponsored  war against the pro Russians government in Afghanistan, in a religious school at the border with Pakistan.

At that time, Osama Bin Laden was openly an instrument of the “Muslim Fundamentalism Card” strategy of Brzezinski, the National Security adviser of President Carter. In the context of this anti Russian alliance with the Mujahedeen/ freedom fighters embraced by President Ronald Reagan, young Afghani were sent to a series of western financed Wahhabi fundamentalist religious school located in Pakistan along the borders with Afghanistan. Talib. Here under Western and Pakistani intelligence sponsorship the future Taliban leadership (such as Khairkhwa) was created.

The future Taliban Interior minister and Guantanamo prisoner was also trained in a camp of Abu Musab al Zarqawi in North Iraq. Zarqawi known as the head of al Qaeda in Iraq, established a terrorist operation in Northern Iraq, after the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein lost completely control of that area following the No-fly zone interdiction imposed by the US. Various western intelligence became extremely active in that area but the Zarqawi operation was not disturbed and actually flourished.