The argument about whether Taliban leader Mullah Omar died two years ago or last week is irrelevant. The key issue is that his death has now been announced and has triggered a dangerous row about who should succeed him. Akhtar Mohammed Mansour says that he has been chosen as the new Taliban chief, but this is disputed by Omar's relatives and other leaders within the group. There are calls for a properly-convened Loya Jirga to resolve the issue. In his first public statement Mansour seemed to set his head against this, demanding instead Taliban unity under his leadership.
The risk of a dispute does not come from the Afghan government forces. It comes from the looming presence of Daesh. The clear danger is that if the Taliban falls into major disputes, rather than its normal low-level bickering, some members may decide to throw in their lot with the terrorists. The butchers of Daesh will as readily turn on other parts of the Taliban as they will assault the forces of the Kabul government of president Ashraf Ghani.
Mansour has one good option, which may help him secure his position as the new Taliban chief. He can press ahead with the postponed peace talks with Kabul that were due to start at the end of last month in Pakistan. These negotiations have the backing of Pakistan, not least from the country's Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI), which has long maintained close relations with the Afghan Talibs.
From the moment of their ouster in 2011, the Taliban was excluded from the Afghan political process. In that year, the then-new president Hamid Karzai warned the hope-filled Bonn donor conference that the Taliban could make a comeback. They had to be crushed while international aid was poured in to transform his ruined country. In the event, very largely because President Bush turned his foolish eye to the destruction of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the Taliban did make a comeback and the rising insecurity permitted much of the international community to welch on its generous promises of aid.
Had a place been left for the Taliban at Bonn, even though they were unlikely to fill it, and had reconciliation rather than triumphalism been the Karzai government's policy, Afghanistan might possibly have been at peace today.
The new opportunity for a negotiated settlement therefore needs to be grasped by both sides. Unlike Mullah Omar, Mansour is prepared to have a high profile. If he can obtain the backing of other Taliban chieftains, he and some of them could be part of a future national unity government in Kabul.
In such a scenario, it would be inevitable that some of the Talibs would break away and probably cast in their lot with Daesh fighters. But there is one impediment to Daesh in Afghanistan, which is that Afghans do not like outsiders. Some Talibs objected vigorously to Mullah Omar's hosting of Osama Bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda foreigners. The destruction of their regime proved them right. There is likely to be little appetite for a repeat of the situation, which turned their country into a pariah state.
Since the 1979 Russian invasion, Afghanistan has known only war for 36 years. Even a people as steeped guerrilla fighting must surely long for peace after so much destruction and so much bloodshed — which has achieved absolutely nothing.
