Mullah Omar, whose death Afghan authorities announced on Wednesday, was the charismatic spiritual leader of the Taliban, and symbolically a man of great significance. This was so even though he was rarely seen and, according to Afghans, has actually been dead since 2013. (The White House said that the Afghan announcement was “credible.”) In the wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks, Mullah Omar refused to hand over Osama bin Laden, his honored “guest” at the time, to the United States government, triggering the invasion of his country.
The international conflict that Mullah Omar helped to start in 2001 is still going on, having cost, thus far, the lives of an estimated ninety-one thousand Afghans, twenty-six thousand of them civilians. Three thousand three hundred and ninety-three soldiers from twenty-nine different countries died, too, the majority of them—two thousand three hundred and sixteen—Americans. The financial cost to U.S. taxpayers alone has been around a trillion dollars, with billions more to come, in the years ahead, in medical bills and other long-term costs for Afghan-war veterans. Although the American combat role in the Afghan war officially ended last December, about ten thousand troops have stayed on as advisers and as a counterterrorism quick-reaction force within a reconstituted NATO mission, and will remain at least through the end of 2016.
Mullah Omar’s Taliban survived NATO’s extended presence in Afghanistan. In some ways, it can be argued that it defeated it. After being dislodged from power by the initial U.S. military assault launched in 2001, the Taliban eventually revived and now has an increasingly robust presence in many parts of the country, leaving Afghanistan in a chronically precarious state. In the past few years, they have carried out suicide attacks (a new tactic for the group) aimed at killing foreigners in Kabul’s hotels and restaurants. The Taliban have also launched frequent assaults on Afghan soldiers and policemen around the country, more than four thousand of whom have been killed in 2015, according to a recent Times report, putting this on track to be the deadliest year for government forces since the conflict began, in 2001. Along the way, the Taliban spun off a lethal franchise in neighboring Pakistan. Among their targets: the schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai, who survived a bullet in the head in 2012.
If he is dead, Mullah Omar joins the growing ranks of his jihadist comrades who have been killed, not least among them bin Laden himself. Also on Wednesday, Pakistani authorities have reported the death, in a shootout, of Malik Ishaq, a notorious Pakistani jihadist and the leader of Lashkar-e-Jangvi, a murderously sectarian group. Earlier this month, it was the turn, in a U.S. drone stroke in Libya, of a Tunisian terrorist called Abu Iyadh, who also spent years in Afghanistan at bin Laden’s side, thanks to Mullah Omar’s peculiar notion of hospitality. But Mullah Omar’s death is being confirmed at the same moment that ISIS—which, in its viciousness and its ability to spread, is something like the perfect storm of jihadism—has begun to make attempted inroads onto the Taliban’s turf in Afghanistan, and has established a presence in a strategic province bordering Pakistan. Despite Taliban warnings to ISIS not to interfere in Afghanistan, the group is believed to be recruiting and planning for an expansion there. A few weeks ago, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a veteran Islamist and a Taliban rival, proclaimed his group’s allegiance to ISIS, and urged his fighters to attack the Taliban. (Coincidentally or not, the Afghan government and the Taliban recently held a round of face-to-face peace talks.)
The secretive Mullah Omar was a veteran of the Afgan mujahideen’s anti-Sovet jihad of the nineteen-eighties. He was missing an eye from a battle wound, and had become a self-taught religious scholar. He became a more widely known figure only in the early nineteen-nineties, when the mujahideen were fighting among themselves for power, and he was named as the leader of the obscure Taliban. The Taliban were an army of religious students who stormed out of Pakistan and into southern Afghanistan in 1994, vowing to do battle against “immoral and corrupt” mujahideen commanders. They quickly conquered the southern city of Kandahar, and two years later seized the country’s capital, Kabul. By then, Mullah Omar—who was rarely photographed—had appeared outside Kandahar’s venerable Ahmed Shah mosque wearing a sacred cloak that was said to have belonged to the Prophet Muhammad. He was proclaimed Keeper of the Faithful by his gaggle of devout armed followers, most of whom, like himself, were ethnic Pashtuns and Sunni Muslims. They were also characterized by their lack of formal schooling, their xenophobia, and their fervent insistence on a strict interpretation of Sharia law. When his followers went to Kabul, Mullah Omar stayed behind in Kandahar, taking up residence in a rambling walled compound outside the city center, where he held forth in oracular fashion and otherwise spent his time with his several wives, children, and a favorite cow that he would reportedly spend hours with, petting it fondly.
In one of their very first acts in Kabul, Taliban fighters stormed the United Nations compound in Kabul and seized the former Afghan President, Mohammad Najibullah, who had taken refuge there since his overthrow, in 1992. The Taliban beat him, castrated him, dragged him behind a jeep, shot him, and then hanged him. This act set the tone for the Taliban’s subsequent rule: they massacred members of the Hazara minority for being Shiites, banned women from working in hospitals or any public offices, and kept girls out of schools; they banned public music, the sale of CDs, and kite flying. Kabul’s sports stadium became an execution ground. In March, 2001, Mullah Omar’s men blew up the two giant stone Buddhas of Bamiyan, archaeological treasures that were fifteen hundred years old.
Mullah Omar had allowed the wealthy Saudi terrorist Osama bin Laden to return to Afghanistan in 1996—he had earlier been a presence during the Soviets’ Afghan war—and establish training camps and bases for jihadists from around the world. The two established a terrorist alliance that culminated in the 9/11 attacks. Mullah Omar’s house in Kandahar was targeted and mostly destroyed by American bombing raids in the autumn of 2011, but he had escaped and gone into hiding. On a visit there a few weeks after the Taliban fled Kandahar, I visited his home and noticed that, while much of it had been pulverized, there was a core of the flat-roofed house that was untouched. The intact rooms had twelve-foot-thick concrete walls. Just outside the home stood a smaller house, which had a similar roof. It, too, was intact. Local residents told me that they believed it had been built especially for visits to Mullah Omar by “the Sheikh,” as bin Laden was known.
On that same trip, I revisited a mujahideen commander with whom I had spent time during the war against the Soviets. His name was Mullah Naquibullah, and his compound turned out to be right next to Mullah Omar’s. When I remarked on his close proximity to the fugitive leader, Naquibullah, a big, hale man, winked and led me to a yard. There were a pair of luxurious pearl-colored Toyota Land Cruisers—XV Limited Editions—and he said, confidingly, “They’re Mullah Omar’s.” He suggested we go see where his old mujahideen camp had been. We drove off in one of Omar’s cars, with Naquibullah at the wheel. He popped a CD, which he said he’d found in the car, into a player, and the sound of Afghan music instantly surrounded us. “But Omar banned music!” I said. Naquibullah shrugged. He explained that the song was a diatribe against a particularly despised Taliban foe, a notorious Uzbek warlord named General Rashid Dostum; its main refrain was: “O murderer of the Afghan people.”
Smiling, Naquibullah turned to me and said, “What would life be without music?”
