Taliban Leader Threatens Obama

By Bruce Riedel The Daily Beast

Mullah Omar, the elusive leader of the Afghan Taliban, has released a bold message to the White House, warning that any plan to boost troop levels in Afghanistan could lead to "bitterness and pain." The Daily Beast’s Bruce Riedel decodes the chilling message.

On the eve of President Barack Hussein Obama’s announcement of troop levels in Afghanistan next week, his enemy Mullah Mohammed Omar has thrown down the gauntlet. In a major message to mark the Muslim holiday of Eid al Adha this week, the commander of the Afghan Taliban addressed “the rulers of the White House” about their plans to increase troop numbers in Afghanistan and to pursue “illogical strategies” that he promises will only lead to “bitterness and pain.”

The self-styled "Amir of Believers," meaning the commander of all the faithful in Islam, tells Obama that he and the Afghan people are experts in defeating empires, having destroyed the English and Russian empires before the invasion of the “imperialistic American crusaders.” In short, Omar welcomes the coming fight with a larger NATO army, and he lays down in this message his no-compromise strategy for victory.

A man educated only in the strictest of fundamentalist Islamic schooling, Mullah Omar has developed a more complex understanding of his enemies in the last year.

To give him his due, Mullah Omar has staged one of the most remarkable military comebacks in history in the last decade. Utterly defeated in late 2001, he retreated into the mountains of southern Afghanistan and the borderlands with Pakistan to regroup. Thanks to George  W. Bush’s failure to finish the job then, the Taliban recovered and now controls much of the south and east of the country and is attacking deeper into the north and west every day. With the benefit of a sanctuary in Pakistan, Omar now believes the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan will be restored to power in the next couple of years.

He is a remarkably secretive man who has met with less than a handful of non-Muslims in his life and prides himself on his piety and simple life. Badly wounded fighting the Soviets, he practices remarkable operational security. His location is a closely guarded secret; reports recently put him in Karachi to escape CIA drones. Normally taciturn, his Eid message is his longest ever, a reflection of the importance of the moment.

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