Taliban Negotiator Was Imposter, Received "A Lot Of Money" From U.S.

By Steve Hynd

It sounds like something from The Onion, but it's by Dexter Filkins in the NYT:

For months, the secret talks unfolding between Taliban and Afghan leaders to end the war appeared to be showing promise, if only because of the appearance of a certain insurgent leader at one end of the table: Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, one of the most senior commanders in the Taliban movement.

But now, it turns out, Mr. Mansour was apparently not Mr. Mansour at all. In an episode that could have been lifted from a spy novel, United States and Afghan officials now say the Afghan man was an impostor, and high-level discussions conducted with the assistance of NATO appear to have achieved little.

�It�s not him,� said a Western diplomat in Kabul intimately involved in the discussions. �And we gave him a lot of money.�

American officials confirmed Monday that they had given up hope that the Afghan was Mr. Mansour, or even a member of the Taliban leadership.

NATO and Afghan officials said they held three meetings with the man, who traveled from in Pakistan, where Taliban leaders have taken refuge.

The fake Taliban leader even met with President Hamid Karzai, having been flown to Kabul on a NATO aircraft and ushered into the presidential palace, officials said.

As you can imagine, Af/Pak watchers on Twitter are having a field day.

The WaPo's Joshua Partlow just adds to the jaw-dropping detail:

A man purporting to be one of the Taliban's most senior commanders convinced both Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the NATO officials who flew him to Afghanistan's capital for meetings, but two senior Afghan officials now believe the man was a lowly shopkeeper from the Pakistani city of Quetta.

...American officials pursuing lower-level Taliban defections have also struggled with identifying who they are dealing with. The senior NATO official said that about 40 percent of the time the men turning themselves over to the government may not be the Taliban fighters they claim to be, but rather are looking for money or protection or something else.

"It's hard to verify who they are," the official said.

Afghan officials said they did not have the name of the man purporting to be Mullah Mansour.

"One would suspect that in our multibillion-dollar intel community there would be the means to differentiate between an authentic Quetta Shura emissary and a shopkeeper," said a U.S. official in Kabul who did not know about the particulars of the Mullah Mansour case. "On the other hand, it doesn't surprise me in the slightest. It may have been Mullah Omar posing as a shopkeeper; I'm sure that our intel whizzes wouldn't have known."

But if the U.S. intelligence community and military cannot identify a Taliban leader across a table, what chance do they have of doing so via a drone's spy-camera from several hundreds of feet up? And just how reliable are the identifications of Taliban leaders in the figures of killed or captured being touted by Petraeus et. al. as signs of "progress"? After all, we now know that the success rate in identifying Taliban when you can question them is only 60%.

As Arif Rafiq writes: Hopefully these imposter reports will cause people to question a lot of the bullshit 'official' data coming out of Afghanistan".