Talks seemed so delicate that officials had asked the media not to mention Mullah Mansour by name
By Kim Sengupta
The Independent
"By any diplomatic or military yardstick the tale of an imposter pretending to be the Taliban's chief negotiator was a disaster. What gives it added bathos is that peace talks with the insurgency is a central element in the West's exit strategy from the war and what has taken place brings the process into question.
At the Nato summit in Lisbon last weekend Mark Sedwill, the urbane British diplomat who is the Alliance's chief civilian official in Afghanistan, asked about the progress of the talks, said he was not aware of any significant developments. One can only assume he had not been told that "Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour", second ranking in the Quetta Shura after Mullah Mohammed Omar, on whose presence such hope had been placed, was not who he seemed to be. The prized delegate, brought in secretly on a UK military aircraft, was indeed from Quetta, but, according to reports, was a shopkeeper, possibly a greengrocer.....
If the fake Mullah was sent by the ISI it is another example of how the Pakistanis, recipients of huge amounts of Western aid, are running rings around the US and allies. But one would like to think he was a shopkeeper from Quetta who saw the main chance and made cash out of the new "Great Game", making very important people look foolish."
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