Al-Qaeda is fighting for complete ideological control over all
Muslim resistance movements worldwide. It wants these resistance
movements to fight their wars within the broader Al-Qaeda parameter,
perceiving the United States as at the root of all the problems that
affect the world. It believes the United States must fail on every front
for peace to prevail. Al-Qaeda has fully indoctrinated the Taliban in
Afghanistan, but the peril of defiance still exists. Al-Qaeda had a bad
experience in Iraq, where it gave unconditional support to the Iraqi
resistance. The US commander, General David Petraeus, held out the
bait of dialogue to Iraq’s Sunni tribal insurgents in 2007, and the leaders of the Iraqi resistance abandoned Al-Qaeda and held negotia-
tions with their sworn enemies, the United States, to expel Al-Qaeda from its strongholds. This left Al-Qaeda with no choice except to
migrate from Iraq to Yemen, to Somalia, and back into Pakistan’s
tribal areas. Al-Qaeda believes it has much deeper roots in Pakistan’s
tribal areas than in Iraq, where it surfaced only after the US invasion.
It admits that its leadership at the time was naïve, but still fears the US
strategy employed in Iraq. The spin-offs of this strategy almost sank
the organization in Pakistan, as in early 2007 with the clash between
the foreign Uzbek fighters and the loyalists of Mullah Nazir, the
commander of the Taliban in Wana, in Pakistan’s South Waziristan.
Born in 1975, Mullah Nazir was associated with the Hizb-i-Islami
Afghanistan of Gulbaddin Hikmatyar during the Soviet invasion
on Afghanistan, before he joined up with the Taliban. He was an
Ahmadzai Wazir with dual Pakistani and Afghan nationality. Nazir
was sympathetic to Al-Qaeda, but his real allegiance was to Mullah
Omar. He was less into ideology and more into tribal traditions. For Nazir, Al-Qaeda members were no more than guests whose protec-
tion was the responsibility of the local tribes under tribal laws and the patronage of Mullah Omar. Mullah Nazir did not view them as
his ideological guides. On the ideological and strategic fronts, he
owned allegiance only to Mullah Omar.
Although the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, at least on the surface, enjoyed good relations with each other, the Taliban were uncomfort-
able with the recent developments in North and South Waziristan.
Almost 40,000 fighters including Chechens, Uzbeks, Arabs, and
Pakistanis had gathered in the two Waziristans in early 2006, but
the leader of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, Tahir Yaldochiv,
had issued a fatwa (opinion) to prioritize fighting against the
Pakistan army over waging the war against the Western coalition
in Afghanistan. This took the Afghan Taliban aback. Although
Al-Qaeda had raised the strength of the Pakistani Taliban to benefit
the Afghan resistance, it also aimed to use this strength against
Pakistan’s army to neutralize Pakistan’s support of the US “War on
Terror” by any means possible. Al-Qaeda saw Afghanistan as its
real theater of war, and considered it imperative to deter Pakistan’s
support of the United States. The Afghan Taliban were not ready to
adopt this approach. They did not want to fight Pakistan’s army.
Al-Qaeda was strategizing events from future perspectives, but
the Afghan Taliban wanted to keep the strategy limited to fighting
the Western coalition forces in Afghanistan. There was a failure in
communications. Mullah Omar’s envoy, Mullah Dadullah, who was
later assassinated, traveled to Pakistan’s tribal areas in 2006 to keep
the focus of the fight on Afghanistan, but a difference of opinion
developed on this, leading to suspicion and animosity. Mullah Nazir
expressed his concerns to Dadullah over the growing influence of the
Uzbek militia in South Waziristan. They had taken little part in the
Afghan campaign, but were actively fueling the insurgency against
the Pakistani armed forces.
Pakistan’s military establishment tried to exploit the devel-
oping differences, cognizant of the fact that Mullah Nazir was the only important Taliban commander in the two Waziristans who,
despite providing them with protection, had kept his distance from
Al-Qaeda’s ideology. The Pakistan Army then actively supported
Mullah Nazir with arms and money to eliminate the Uzbeks. In
early 2007, this resulted in an internecine conflict between the
Uzbeks and the Taliban loyal to Mullah Nazir. Hundreds of Uzbeks
were massacred. The rest took refuge with Baitullah Mehsud.
But there was more to the story. Mullah Nazir comes from the
Wazir tribe in South Waziristan, the traditional rivals of the Mehsud
tribe. Despite their common ideological identity, Baitullah Mehsud
and Nazir were rival militia commanders, and Nazir was jealous of
the Uzbeks always putting their weight behind Baitullah Mehsud.
Al-Qaeda had a limited interest in the event as the Uzbeks were not
strictly tied to its organizational network. They were only associated
with Al-Qaeda’s broader aims. However, Al-Qaeda feared that the
emerging contradictions and minor differences within the several
factions operating under its ideological banner might be exploited
by the enemy at some stage to spoil its hard-earned successes. This
fear gave birth to the TTP in early 2008. Al-Qaeda gathered all
the Pakistani pro-Taliban groups under the TTP flag. Baitullah
Mehsud was then installed as its first chief, and Hafiz Gul Bahadar
and Molvi Faqir appointed as his lieutenants. To allay suspicions,
Mullah Omar was declared the chief patron, but the TTP served as
the catalyst to draw the Afghan Taliban away from his influence, to
carry forward the Al-Qaeda agenda in the region.
Commanders such as Gul Bahadar and Mullah Nazir had been
against Mehsud’s command from the very beginning, but Al-Qaeda
helped Mehsud garner strength and broaden the TTP base all the
way down from Pakistan’s Khyber Agency to South Waziristan, and
later from Peshawar to Karachi. Although the Afghan Taliban tried
to distance themselves from the TTP, they could not condemn them
outright as the TTP still sent a good number of fighters to support
their war against the US–NATO coalition in Afghanistan. Baitullah
Mehsud alone sent some 250 groups in 2008 to Helmand in support
of the Afghan Taliban fighting there. By the end of 2008, the TTP
had succeeded in establishing its presence in seven of Pakistan’s
tribal agencies and the bordering regions of Afghanistan, and its
influence now ran all the way to the southern Pakistan province of
Balochistan. TTP’s formations were then able to erode Pakistan’s
connections in the tribal areas, and at the same time to minimize
Mullah Omar’s influence there. From 2008, onwards Mullah Omar
had repeatedly urged the TTP to shun violence against Pakistan’s
security apparatus, but the TTP paid no attention to him.
The TTP now had a long natural bunker running along the Hindu
Kush and some of the smaller mountain chains in the region, to stand
as a formidable shield against the military designs of the mighty US
war machine. With that Al-Qaeda decided to move forward and
resume international operations, which had been obstructed by
security crackdowns on their cells in Pakistan’s cities, hitherto their
only passage to the outside world. Iran’s Jundullah presented a
solution to their problem. Al-Qaeda established a connection with
the Iranian Jundullah in 2009.