Nov. 23) -- For months, NATO helicopters ferried a man believed to be one of the Taliban's most senior commanders back and forth from Pakistan to Kabul for secret talks with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
The bearded, turbaned man identified himself as Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour and engaged in high-level secret talks with Karzai and his aides on at least three occasions, showing keen insight into Afghanistan's politics. His willingness to negotiate on behalf of the reclusive, dangerous Taliban was heralded by everyone from Karzai to Gen. David Petraeus as one of the most hopeful signs that peace could finally come to Afghanistan.
But they were all duped, apparently.
In a bizarre twist straight out of a spy novel, it appears the man everyone thought was Mansour was actually an impostor -- a lowly shopkeeper from the Pakistani city of Quetta. The revelation has dashed hopes for fruitful peace talks, flooded NATO and Afghan officials with embarrassment and reeled everyone back to square one.
"It's not him," an unidentified Western diplomat told The New York Times. "And we gave him a lot of money."
Accounts also appear in The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal.
Serious doubts about Mansour's identity arose after his third trip to Kabul, when an Afghan official who had known him years ago said he didn't recognize him, the Times reported. Afghan officials told the Post they showed photos of the man at the talks to other Afghans who knew Mansour and confirmed it wasn't him.
American officials also told the Times they have concluded the man wasn't Mansour, though they didn't say how they confirmed it, through fingerprints or other evidence.
It's unclear who sent the man to pose as Mansour and what their motive is. Afghan officials told the Post he could have been sent by Pakistan's intelligence service to test the waters and see what the Afghan government is offering in exchange for peace. Other officials say he could have been a simple bandit trying to collect money, or that he was a lower-level Taliban official posing as his chief.
The Post quoted two senior Afghan officials as saying the man is a shopkeeper from Quetta.
Whatever his real identity and motive, the man's brazen maneuver underscores the difficulty in verifying the identities of secretive Taliban leaders, infamous for their reclusiveness and low-tech way of life. Often bearded, turbaned and bespectacled, many have been living in mountains on the Pakistan-Afghan border for decades, unseen by the West. No known photographs of them exist.
It could be why Osama bin Laden has eluded capture for so long as well.
The case of mistaken identity has proved to be a bit of an embarrassment for Karzai, who allowed the man to be escorted into his presidential palace for face-to-face meetings. The Afghan president has forged ahead with high-level, secretive talks with the Taliban despite some initial skepticism from Washington. The realization that he may have been duped means Karzai risks losing face.
Karzai told a news conference today that he never met with Mansour, but didn't say whether he may have met with an impostor, The Associated Press reported. Overall reports about the meeting are not acceptable, he said cryptically without elaborating.
n the end, the revelation about Mansour's identity represents a setback for Karzai's peace efforts, negating any progress the Afghan government believed it was making in talks with Taliban leaders. Mansour's presence was one of the things Afghans believed showed promise about the talks.
As recently as last month, Petraeus, the top U.S. commander for Afghanistan, heralded Taliban leaders' willingness to negotiate as a sign of progress, though he didn't single out Mansour by name. American troops and their NATO allies helped facilitate the talks, flying Taliban figures on NATO aircraft and securing Afghan roads for their safe passage.
NATO refused to comment publicly today on reports about the apparent impostor, the BBC reported.
Filed under: World, Afghanistan
