 The Taliban's one-eyed leader Mullah Omar has lost the confidence of some of his commanders after the failure of the insurgents to disrupt Afghanistan's first presidential election, the U.S. military said on Wednesday.
"Wot do we do now, Ollie?"
"I don't know, Stanley! What do we do now, Omar?" |
But a Taliban spokesman denied any rift in the movement.
| "No, no! Certainly not!... Duck!" |
U.S. military spokesman Major Scott Nelson told reporters the Taliban leadership was in disarray after a campaign built around rocket attacks and roadside bombs failed to dissuade millions of Afghans from voting in the Oct. 9 poll. "There has been serious disagreements between Mullah Omar and some of his lower commanders on how (what) strategy to follow up after the elections," Nelson said. Better intelligence and a strategy of taking the fight to the Taliban paid off with a string of arrests and discovery of planted explosives. Nelson said Afghan security forces had detained some 100 guerrillas on the polling day alone, while U.S.-led forces killed and captured 22 in the two days before the vote. "There is significant demoralisation among the Taliban because they were unable to disrupt the election," Nelson said.
| "I'm so demoralized! I just hate it when they vote!" |
Taliban spokesman Abdul Latif Hakimi denied any rift in the movement's leadership and said it was U.S. spin-doctoring. "This is just propaganda. Our Jihad (holy war) will continue," he told Reuters by satellite telephone.
| "We have a crack team of islamic lawyers who are going to protest the disenfranchisement of absentee jihad fighters whose votes were thrown out due to not having a Pakistani postmark." |
With vote counting still underway, Hamid Karzai looked set to retain the presidency he has held since being placed at the head of an interim government after the fall of the Taliban in 2001. Karzai says there are only around a hundred Taliban whose crimes are so great that they are unredeemable, but he has held out an olive branch to more moderate elements of the movement. |