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May 22nd, 2016 
Awake Goy The drone strike took place at 3 pm local time on Saturday, targeting the Pakistan side of a remote border region with Afghanistan southwest of the town of Ahmad Wal.
The mission was signed off on by US President Barack Obama and carried out by American special operations forces.
Pakistan and Afghanistan were reportedly not informed of the operation beforehand, AFP said.
“Both the Pakistanis and the Afghans were notified shortly after the strike,” a senior White House official told the agency.
The American drone hit men traveling in a vehicle, AP cited an official as saying, with Reuters adding that at least one more fighter is presumed killed.
A State Department official has confirmed that Pakistan and Afghanistan were notified of the strike.
Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook confirmed that an air strike targeting Mansour took place, adding that Mansour was an “obstacle” to establishing peace between Taliban leaders and the Afghan government.
However, Cook could not confirm whether the strike had been successful. “We are still assessing the results of the strike and will provide more information as it becomes available,” Cook said.
Meanwhile, the Taliban has denied that its leader has been killed, Al Jazeera reported.
Mansour took over the Taliban’s leadership position in July 2015, replacing its founder and spiritual leader Mullah Mohammad Omar, who passed away in 2013. Notably, the Taliban only confirmed the death of Omar in 2015.
Mansour first joined the Taliban in 1995. There had been reports that Mansour was killed in a battle last year, but they were denied by the Afghan government.
The Pentagon claims that Mansour was involved in organizing attacks “presenting a threat to Afghan civilians and security forces, our personnel, and Coalition partners.”
However, critics of US drone strikes have questioned whether Afghanistan will profit from the death of another Taliban leader who will soon be replaced by another, as the prospect of peace between the militants and the government becomes even more remote.
“I’d give them the benefit of the doubt and say they think they have in fact killed the Taliban leader. The question is, ‘What’s the point?’ What’s the military point? Fifteen years since the start of the US invasion in October 2001, more of Afghanistan today is under control of the Taliban than it was then,” Brian Becker, of the anti-war ANSWER coalition, told RT.
Becker believes that targeted killings are “not going to bring an end to the war,” but indeed the opposite.
“It seems to me that the United States by arrogating to itself the decision who lives and who dies within Afghanistan or amongst the Taliban leadership is fact is snuffing out any prospect for a peaceful negotiated settlement,” Becker argued.
Becker noted that Mansour, in fact, claimed that he was open to negotiations after stepping in as the militant group’s head, so his killing makes little sense militarily.
“It means that they [the US] are opting for endless war in Afghanistan, something the American people don’t support,” Becker surmised.
Mansour had required the withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan as a precondition for entering peace talks with the Afghan government – something Becker believes “will be the position of almost all of the Afghan Taliban leadership.”
‘US must understand: Afghan govt has to talk to Pakistan, not Taliban’
To get an Afghan perspective on the developments on the ground, RT talked to Prince Ali Seraj, President of the National Coalition for Dialogue with the Tribes of Afghanistan (NCDTA).
Seraj doubted that the death of Mansour would make much difference for Afghanistan, as he believes Taliban leaders are merely puppets of external forces. According to the Afghan prince, Pakistani authorities are “pushing the buttons” there, all to attract more US support.
“Who are these Taliban? What Taliban are we talking about? The Chechens? The Saudis? The Uzbeks? The Arabs? There’s no particular person who’s in charge of all the Taliban, the so-called Taliban, in Afghanistan… These so-called leaders are just pieces of pawn that the Pakistani ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence] uses for the benefit… so they can take more money from the United States,” he said.
According to Seraj, negotiations have to begin “between the Afghan government and the Pakistan government, not between the Afghan government and the so-called Taliban.”
The NCDTA head compared the process to a “game,” in which the US is allegedly being duped.
“The US has got to understand that this is a game, and they’re being played with, and we’re being played with, and in the process, thousands of our people are getting killed,” he stressed.
Source Article from https://www.rt.com/news/343964-taliban-afghan-leader-killed-airstrike/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=RSS
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