KEY POINTS:
Mullah Dadullah's well-deserved reputation as the most feared of the Taleban commanders was earned on the back of savage and symbolic acts of violence but his death also had symbolic significance.
By repeatedly declaring that he was the overall military chief of Taleban forces in Afghanistan, the group's main link to al Qaeda and the architect of the suicide bombing campaign, Dadullah made himself an obvious and high-priority target for Nato and President Hamid Karzai's Government.
But although the killing of Dadullah was of positive propaganda value at a time when not much had been going right for Karzai and his Western backers, it is unlikely to lead to any immediate change to the Afghan insurgency.
The Taleban do not have a monolithic command and control structure or a centralised operational base. They are, instead, smallish groups who tend to carry out actions independently.
The leaders of the insurgency had learned that putting large-scale forces on the ground can be hugely counter-productive.
Last year the Taleban gathered about 1500 fighters in the south and asserted that they would take Kandahar, their spiritual home. But it proved a major mistake to try to match Nato forces in conventional battle and hundreds of insurgents were killed and wounded.
Since then the Taleban have gone back to the tactics of guerrilla attacks and this is not going to be altered due to the death of Dadullah.
Other commanders will step into his shoes although they choose to be less high-profile than he was.
Some of Dadullah's methods, especially the use of suicide bombers, which killed far more Afghans than Westerners, and the beheading of prisoners, again overwhelmingly Afghan, had led to consternation among many who themselves do not like the presence of foreign troops in their country. The number of suicide bombings in Kandahar, where they were particularly prevalent, had gone down due to the discovery and dismantling of bomber cells. The vast majority of the raids by the security forces came from information supplied by members of the public who may, in the past, have chosen not to do so.
Dadullah had also made enemies within his own side. Some blame him for engineering the assassination of a rival commander in a Nato air strike by passing on details of his movement through Pakistani connections. Nato military sources claimed Dadullah's death was the result of information supplied from within the insurgency.
As a Taleban commander in the civil war he was accused of civilian massacres and abandoning his troops during the United States-led invasion of 2001, and of paying the Northern Alliance US$150,000 ($203,588) to secure his escape to Pakistan.
- INDEPENDENT
