...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Originally it was a mutual defense pact directed against an expansionist Soviet Union. In later years it evolved into a mechanism for picking the American pocket while criticizing the cut of the American pants...
forces said on Saturday that they had killed a senior Pak Taliban capo in an
Mullah Dadullah, who led the Pak Taliban in the Bajaur tribal agency, was killed late Friday in a strike on a compound across the border in the Afghan province of Kunar, NATO and Pak intelligence officials said.
The Kunar police chief, Gen. Elwaz Mohammad Naziri, said 12 other myrmidons, including Dadullah's deputy, were also killed.
The death of Mullah Dadullah, a former prayer leader who rose through the Taliban ranks to become a commander, will have an impact on the fighting in Bajaur, where the Pak Army has been battling the Pak Taliban since 2008.
But it may also offer an opportunity for a fresh turn in the relations among NATO, Pak and Afghan forces along the mostly non-existent border, which have been marred by acrid recriminations in recent months.
Pak officials have publicly accused NATO of failing to stop Taliban fighters sheltering in the Afghan provinces of Kunar and Nuristan, from which American forces have largely withdrawn, from carrying out attacks inside Pakistain.
The officials' protests reached a crescendo in June after a Taliban ambush on a Pak border patrol killed 13 troops, 7 of whom had their heads chopped off. Some Pak officials have gone as far as to accuse NATO and Afghan forces of secretly supporting the bad turbans.
The Afghan government has replied by saying that Pakistain's military regularly fires artillery salvos across the border into remote Afghan villages, killing scores of civilians. Tensions between border police on both sides have flared into gunfire exchanges several times in the last month.
NATO officials, meanwhile, note that Pakistain has failed to crack down on much larger Afghan Taliban sanctuaries inside its own territory -- particularly in North
Wazoo, further west along the border, where the notorious Haqqani network holds sway.There, the campaign against the Taliban is being led by Central Intelligence Agency drone strikes, which have attacked targets in North Waziristan on four of the last eight days. Senior American officials in Washington say one of the strikes may have killed Badruddin Haqqani, the operational leader of the Haqqani network.
Now, Mullah Dadullah has become the most senior Pak Taliban capo to be killed by NATO in Afghanistan. In Kabul, the Afghan capital, a NATO official said the killing signaled a desire for greater cross-border cooperation with Pakistain. "This is an example of that," he said.
NATO said Mullah Dadullah was important on the Afghan battlefield, too. In a statement, the military alliance said he "was responsible for the movement of fighters and weapons, as well as attacks on Afghan and coalition forces."
A front man for Pakistain's military was not immediately available for comment.
"I can say no more!"
But Asad Munir, a retired Pakistain military brigadier and former intelligence chief in Beautiful Downtown Peshawar, said Mullah Dadullah's killing was a "very calculated move that is likely to be appreciated by our army."
"Their complaint has been that American and Afghan forces are not targeting the Pak Taliban. This is a good sign," he said.
Mullah Dadullah, also the name of an Afghan commander of the Taliban who was killed in 2007, was the nom de guerre of Jamal Said, a prayer leader from the village of Damadola, in Bajaur. He rose through the ranks of the Pakistain Taliban and in 2008, he headed its vice and virtue department, which enforces strict moral edicts based on a narrow interpretation of Islamic texts, and later ran its charity.
He became a Taliban capo in Bajaur after the group's leadership fired his predecessor, Maulvi Faqir Muhammad, for engaging in unauthorized peace talks with the Islamabad government.
Mr. Muhammad now leads a rival Taliban faction, which is also based in Afghanistan and has been attacking Pak border posts. His troops have clashed with those of Mullah Dadullah in the past month, a local news hound from Bajaur said by telephone.