Taliban’s New Leader, More Scholar Than Fighter, Is Slow to Impose Himself By MUJIB MASHAL and TAIMOOR SHAH in the NY Times, July 12, 2016

KABUL, Afghanistan — The early tenure of the Taliban’s new leader, a low-key religious scholar seen as a potential unifier, has been notable for lacking the drama his predecessor seemed unable to shake.
But even after two months in the role, Mawlawi Haibatullah Akhundzadaremains something of a mystery to the Taliban rank and file, according to analysts and insurgent commanders. And he has yet to make any high-profile mark on an insurgency that is stretched by internal divisions.
Many view him as lacking the grip and influence that his predecessor,Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, had amassed before being killed in an American drone strike in May. Mullah Mansour’s tenure was marked by purges and open rebellion that have receded into the background.
Despite that, some commanders have refused to pledge allegiance to Mawlawi — a title reserved for Islamic scholars — Haibatullah, according to interviews with Taliban commanders and officials.
From the first days of the hasty leadership meetings that elevated Mawlawi Haibatullah, it was clear that the Taliban’s decision-making power was returning to the insurgency’s senior council based in Quetta, Pakistan — a politburo of about two dozen clerics and commanders split between the older generation that founded the Taliban and newer members who were empowered more recently.
Mawlawi Haibatullah’s perceived strengths, and the very traits that made him attractive as a potential unifier, lie in a slower kind of influence: his shunning of the limelight and his deep ties to the radical religious schools that for years have provided the Taliban with an ideological core of committed fighters.
“Mawlawi Haibatullah’s area of influence is with the mullahs and the religious leaders, not the management and the commanders,” said Borhan Osman, a researcher with the Afghanistan Analysts Network who haswritten extensively about the Taliban.
How Mawlawi Haibatullah fares will depend on the space he can carve with the dozen influential members of the senior council, or shura, who “call the shots,” Mr. Osman said. “I don’t think he will be left to his own ideals — maybe to express, but not to enforce.” Agency
In some ways, Mawlawi Haibatullah’s selection is a return to the roots of the Taliban insurgency. In those years, little was known about the Taliban’s top echelon. Rarely photographed or filmed, they amounted to myths, their vague identities exploited by local warlords and politicians to report rivals as insurgents.
“Mawlawi Haibatullah is calm and understanding, a symbol of politeness who has always led a humble lifestyle,” said Hajji Saifidad Aka, an elder from the new leader’s birth village of Rigi, in Kandahar Province.
Both for his modest upbringing and for his quiet ways, Mawlawi Haibatullah, now in his 50s, is sometimes compared to the movement’s founding leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, who abhorred publicity, in part out of a belief that he derived his legitimacy from a connection to God and not from a popular mandate.
That differed greatly from the style of Mullah Mansour, who became a vastly more public and pragmatic figure in the months after he made his bid for power in 2015. He deeply alienated many commanders with his close political ties to Pakistan, his violent pursuit of commanders who would not bend the knee to him, and, especially, his lavish life and grip on both a personal drug fortune and the Taliban’s overall finances.
“Mansour was the money man; that was his key strength. What other insurgency makes their accountant the top guy?” said Franz-Michael Mellbin, the European Union’s ambassador and special representative to Afghanistan. “It will be important to see what happens to the money flow.”
Some of the individual financing streams may have been disrupted after Mullah Mansour’s death, but Afghan and American officials say they believe that the larger flow will remain unaffected because there is a robust bureaucracy overseeing it.
In addition to his uncharacteristic enjoyment of a rich lifestyle, Mullah Mansour showed contradictory impulses.
He indicated that he might lead the Taliban to the negotiating table, yet on the eve of the first round of talks with the Afghan government he suddenly disappeared, his phones turned off. (His travel records, leaked after his death and subsequently confirmed by Pakistani officials, showed him leaving Quetta for Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, during that time.)
Mawlawi Haibatullah, on the other hand, has been seen as a more constant personality: a disciplinarian, scholar and judge who has lived a modest life of religious studies and court appointments, according to details of his life pieced together from interviews with friends and fellow Taliban.
Mawlawi Haibatullah’s father was a village imam in the Panjwai district of Kandahar. Not owning any land or orchards of their own, the family depended on what the congregation paid the imam in cash or crops. Young Haibatullah began his studies under the gaze of his father, and when the family migrated to Quetta after the Soviet invasion, he continued at one of the first seminaries established in the Sarnan neighborhood, according to villagers and Taliban figures who know him.
After the Taliban swept to national power in 1996, one of his first jobs was in Farah Province, as part of the feared “vice and virtue” police who doled out punishments to those who had short beards or long hair, for example. But Mawlawi Haibatullah was soon moved to Kandahar and was made an instructor at the Jihadi Madrasa, the seminary of about 10,000 students that Mullah Omar personally looked after.
As a shaper of the Taliban ideology in Quetta, Mawlawi Haibatullah had a high enough profile to be targeted for assassination. Mullah Ibrahim, a student of Mawlawi Haibatullah, recalled an attempt on his life about four years ago, for which the Taliban later blamed the Afghan intelligence agency.
“During one of his lectures in Quetta one day about four years ago, a man stood among the students and pointed a pistol at Mawlawi Haibatullah from a close range, but the pistol stuck,” Mullah Ibrahim recalled. “He was trying to shoot him, but he failed, and the Taliban rushed to tackle” the man, he said, adding that Mawlawi Haibatullah did not move in the chaos.
In the years since the insurgency moved its leadership to Quetta, Mawlawi Haibatullah rose to become a trusted adviser to Mullah Omar. Yet he remained largely in the background. He contributed to the Taliban’s internal guidelines on education and discipline.
“Three years ago, I remember him speaking to about a dozen Taliban shadow governors, and he asked them, ‘Do you know why people support the government militias?’ ” recalled Hajji Saifidad Aka. “He pointed fingers at the governors and said, ‘It’s because you people cut off their heads for receiving minor help from an aid agency.’ ”
After his promotion to the deputy leader of the Taliban last summer, Mawlawi Haibatullah put in place a system under which a commission would be formed under the shadow governor in every province that could investigate abusive commanders or fighters, according to Mullah Abdul Bari, a Taliban commander in Helmand Province.
Yet for all that, the Taliban’s brutality has seemed to continue unchecked in the field this year, perhaps a cautionary example for those who expected the insurgency to change its ways under Mawlawi Haibatullah.
Taliban fighters have reportedly used scorched-earth tactics in Baghlan Province, summarily executed an elderly militia commander in Helmand by hanging him from a tree, and abducted dozens of passengers from buses on highways, shooting at least 10 of them dead.
And as the insurgents’ offensive against the Afghan government continues its intense pace this summer, Afghan civilians are still being killed at record rates. The United Nations has said that antigovernment forces, particularly the Taliban, are responsible for the majority of those deaths.http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/world/asia/taliban-afghanistan-pakistan-mawlawi-haibatullah-akhundzada.html?_r=0