Saturday’s bombing raid, the first known American assault on a top Afghan Taliban leader on Pakistani soil, marks a major blow to the militant movement, which saw a new resurgence under Mansour.
“We have removed the leader of an organisation that has continued to plot against and unleash attacks on American and Coalition forces, to wage war against the Afghan people, and align itself with extremist groups like Al-Qaeda,” the US president said in a statement. Senior Taliban sources have also confirmed the killing to AFP, adding that a shura (council) is under way to select a new leader.
Obama, who is on a three-day visit to Vietnam, said Mansour had rejected efforts “to seriously engage in peace talks and end the violence that has taken the lives of countless innocent Afghan men, women and children.” He called on the Taliban’s remaining leadership to engage in peace talks as the “only real path” to ending the attritional conflict.
Mansour was elevated to the leadership of the Taliban in July 2015 following the revelation that the group’s founder Mullah Omar had died two years earlier. He was killed on Saturday near the town of Ahmad Lal in Pakistan’s south western Balochistan province, when missiles fired from a drone struck the car he was travelling in.
It was believed to be the first time the United States has targeted a senior Taliban figure in Pakistan. Pakistan, which says it is hosting the Afghan Taliban’s top leadership in order to exert influence over them, has lambasted the United States over the drone attack, calling it a violation of its sovereignty.
In his statement, Obama said American forces would continue to go after threats on Pakistani soil.
“We will work on shared objectives with Pakistan, where terrorists that threaten all our nations must be denied safe haven,” he said.
But the strike could signal a fresh blow for US-Pakistan ties, which have improved markedly in recent years since the killing of Al-Qaeda founder Osama Bin Laden in 2011.
The US has carried out hundreds of drone strikes in the Pakistan, mainly in the country’s border tribal regions with Afghanistan, with leaked documents showing Islamabad had quietly consented, despite publicly protesting.
US lifts Vietnam arms embargo
The US has fully lifted its ban on weapons sales to Vietnam, President Barack Obama announced on Monday during a visit to Hanoi, unpicking a decades-old embargo on the one-time enemy.
“The United States is fully lifting the ban on the sale of military equipment to Vietnam that has been in place for some fifty years,” he said at a joint press conference alongside his Vietnamese counterpart President Tran Dai Quang. Both countries are warily eyeing China’s military build-up in the disputed South China Sea.
But Obama was keen to separate the decision to allow arms sales to the communist nation from shared concerns over Beijing’s claims to contested waters. “The decision to lift the ban was not based on China...but on our desire to complete what has been a lengthy process moving towards normalisation with Vietnam,” he said.
“At this stage, both sides have developed a level of trust and cooperation including our militaries,” the US leader added. Vietnam’s leader Quang welcomed the rollback of the Cold War-era ban on lethal weapons exports.
Obama’s three-day visit to Vietnam comes some 41 years after the North Vietnamese army and its Viet Cong allies marched into Saigon, humiliating the world’s preeminent superpower.
The rollback of the arms embargo is highly symbolic of a shift in relations that has seen a surge in trade and cultural changes between the two countries that were locked in a bitter, bloody conflict just a generation ago.
The US is cosying up to Asia-Pacific countries in a strategic shift to tap the trade potential of the region and as a bulwark to the influence of regional superpower China.
Vietnam’s military spending has surged in the last decade, by 130 per cent since 2005, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. But much of Vietnam’s arsenal is made up of ageing Russia-built equipment.