Baitullah Mehsud, Dead or Alive

By Steve Hynd

There are conflicting reports about whether notorious Pakistani Tehrik-i-Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud has been killed by a U.S. drone attack that also killed his wife. Pakistani officials say they believe he is dead but are trying to get confirmation, Bill Roggio's usual anonymous military sources say he isn't and his own aides say he is. I'm inclined to believe he is.

So what now?

Well, first of all there's the matter of his successor and whether his death will have any real calming effect on the Pakistani Pashtun/Taliban insurgency. A friend points out that Mehsud is in many ways more like a Talibanized Tribal than Taliban. "The guy stepping up can't be just anyone with experience but also the right familial-clan connections in order to run the show."  However, there seems to be no shortage of such candidates. Bill Roggio runs through the possibilities:

Possible successors to Baitullah include his cousins Hakeemullah Mehsud and Qari Hussain Mehsud; North Waziristan leader Hafiz Gul Bahadar; and Bajaur Taliban sub-commander Waliur Rahman.

Hakeemullah directs Taliban operations in Arakzai, Kurram, and Khyber. He has been behind the attacks against NATO convoys moving through Peshawar. More than 700 NATO vehicles and containers have been destroyed in these attacks over the past eight months.

Qari Hussain is a feared military commander in South Waziristan. He is notorious for training children to become suicide bombers.

Hafiz Gul Bahadar is also a candidate to take over the Pakistani Taliban in the event of Baitullah's death. Bahadar is widely respected in Taliban circles and has close links to the Taliban in Afghanistan as well as to al Qaeda.

Waliur Rahman is a deputy military commander under Faqir Mohammed in Bajaur. He leads the Jaish-i-Islami Pakistan, a Taliban subgroup, and in the past has led Taliban negotiations with the tribes. In late June, the Pakistani government placed a $61,500 bounty out for Rahman's capture.

Certainly not the "non-entities" Pakistani officials are saying are the only candidates.  Spencer Ackerman writes:

the issue is that insurgent groups tend to organize themselves precisely for survivability in the event of decapitation. In Iraq, the U.S. killed and detained a lot of al-Qaeda in Iraq leaders, including Abu Musab al-Zarqawi himself, but only when the Sunni Iraqi population decisively turned against AQI did the terrorist network find itself, for all strategic purposes, defeated...We're only deluding ourselves if we think that the decisive moment for Pakistan's victory over the Taliban was Mehsud's death. And after eight long years of this, we have no excuse for those delusions.

I'd think that was exactly right - but that Pakistani officials, who still believe they can preserve their Taliban connections sub rosa against the day when they'll be useful as a proxy force of Pakistani foreign policy again, will already be looking to cut deals with Mehsud's successor. And therein lies a real danger. If Pakistan's government agrees a truce with Mehsud's network, that only frees militants to concentrate their efforts on the US and allied occupation of Afghanistan. Mehsud's death could end up being just bad news for America.

Secondly, a lot of hawkish types are going to use Mehsud's death to say that the U.S. program of drone attacks in Pakistan is worth it, despite it killing civilians at a rate of ten to one and inflaming public opinion across Pakistan, particularly in Pashtun areas. Those hawks should probably wait to see what the Pashtun reaction to the death-from-above of a major tribal chieftain's wife is before they crow too much. I'd predict that the Pashtun honor code will demand vengeance for that even more than for Mehsud's death - and whether a given Pashtun is sympathetic to the Taliban or not won't have a lot to do with it.