Pakistan Taliban chief Mehsud believed dead

Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) chief Baitullah Mehsud was reportedly killed in the Wednesday, August 5 by an American drone attack in a South Waziristan village in which his second wife had been confirmed killed.

Mehsud was one of Pakistan’s most wanted men and had a $5 million US bounty on his head. He was the prime suspect in Benazir Bhutto’s assassination and the September 2007 Rawalpindi bombings, and had claimed responsibility for the March 2009 Lahore police academy attack.

The Pakistani ministry of interior has officially confirmed Mehsud’s death, though the authorities have failed to retrieve his body. Government officials in Islamabad say they have acquired credible intelligence that he was buried in South Waziristan on Wednesday along with his wife, other relatives and bodyguards.  

The officials said Mehsud’s Prado jeep was found in the compound (in Zangara village of the Laddha subdivision) that was targeted in the drone attack.

For the US, Mehsud was the fourth most dangerous terrorist in Pakistan-Afghanistan. The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s $5 million bounty had placed him just behind Afghanistan Taliban chief Mullah Mohammad Omar ($10 million), and al Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden and Dr Ayman Zawahiri ($25 million each).

The Obama administration’s move to announce the bounty on March 26 on Mehsud was largely aimed at dissuading his 25,000-plus private army to join hands with the Taliban militia of Mullah Omar, who had announced a major spring offensive against Nato bases in Afghanistan.

Mehsud had told reporters invited to a hideout in mountainous South Waziristan in May 2008 that he had been sending his fighters to battle US troops in Afghanistan. “Yes, we are helping the Taliban in the jehad against the US,” Mehsud had said, holding an AK-47 as he sat in a disused school building in the village of Kotkai. He denied he was sheltering Bin Laden, but said he would like to meet him. “If Osama needs protection in our areas, we will feel proud to shelter him,” he said.

Mehsud’s admitting he was sending fighters to Afghanistan led to enormous US pressure on Pakistan to scrap a likely peace deal with him. A Nato spokesman went to the extent of threatening retaliatory strikes if Mehsud’s militants kept entering Afghanistan from Pakistan. This compelled Pakistani military leaders not to withdraw troops from the tribal area under Mehsud’s control, as was to be in the proposed peace agreement with him. Mehsud, therefore, announced the suspension of talks with the Pakistani government, saying American pressure had forced it to not honour the peace accord.

Mehsud was short and portly, and suffering from hypertension and diabetes. When reports of his illness started spreading in the Pakistani media in late 2008, he responded by marrying -- a second time -- in October a girl of his tribe in Dwa Toi village. This was a few days after Time magazine named him among the world’s 100 most influential people and Newsweek titled him ‘more dangerous than Osama bin Laden’.
 
WHAT DOES IT MEAN?
Mehsud’s death will probably not mean much for US efforts to combat terrorism in the restive Pak-Aghan border region, at least directly, say senior diplomats in Islamabad
But the US will be happy to have eliminated a militant leader whose actions were destabilising Pakistan to the point where concerns were growing over the safety of the country’s nuclear assets

For Pakistan, his death is of major symbolic value, showing the country’s efforts to push back the Taliban tide in the northwest going in the right direction, with the army already in the final stages of a campaign to clear the insurgents out of Swat, a valley far to the east, closer to the capital Islamabad

Mehsud never mattered much in Afghanistan: his stronghold in mountainous South Waziristan is not contiguous with the Afghan border; he may have controlled over 20,000 fighters, but it did not translate into any large-scale attack on Western forces in Afghanistan.