Pakistan’s intelligence had knowledge about the death of reclusive Taliban chief Mullah Omar and its move to hide the news is “failure” of not only the US-Pak intelligence <g data-gr-id="22">co-operation,</g> but also the American intelligence as well, a former top Pentagon official has said.
Mullah Omar, the one-eyed commander who led the Taliban for some 20 years, is reported to have died in a hospital in Karachi on April 23, 2013. But the information about his mysterious death, most probably due to tuberculosis, was leaked only this month and then subsequently confirmed by the Taliban, White House and the governments of Afghanistan and Pak.
Pakistan, which has considerable influence over the Taliban leadership and was instrumental in bringing them to the peace talks with the democratically elected Afghanistan government, has as usual denied that it had any information about the death of Omar.
However, David Sedney, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Afghanistan-Pakistan during 2009-2013, has intensive knowledge of the terrorist groups of the region and has strong network of contacts within the intelligence community of the region and the US, refuses to buy the Pakistani argument. “I am highly highly confident that at least few people in the Pakistani government and intelligence agencies (Inter-Services Intelligence) knew about this (death of Mullah Omar),” <g data-gr-id="23">Sedney</g> said.
“The whole issue of Mullah Omar’s death and the fact that it was kept secret for so long and so successfully leads to a host of other questions,” he said. “People are asking everywhere - in Afghanistan and Pakistan, in the US, - how did this happen and why? Because to carry out that kind of deception, I would say, is an example of highly professional intelligence tactics. There does not seem to be any history, anywhere I know of, similar kinds of movements where they have lost a leader and then kept it secret for so long,” <g data-gr-id="32">Sedney</g> said.