KABUL — The closer integration of the feared Haqqani militant network into the leadership of the Taliban is changing the flow of the Afghan insurgency this year, with the Haqqanis’ senior leader increasingly calling the shots in the Taliban’s offensive, Afghan and American officials say.
The Haqqanis have refined a signature brand of urban terrorist attacks and cultivated a sophisticated international fund-raising network, factoring prominently in the US military’s push to keep troops in Afghanistan.
Just last month, the Haqqanis were believed to be behind a truck bomb attack in Kabul that killed 64 people and wounded hundreds.
Now, the group’s growing role in leading the entire insurgency has raised concerns about an even deadlier year of fighting ahead, as hopes of peace talks have collapsed. The shift also is raising tensions with the Pakistani military, which American and Afghan officials accuse of sheltering the Haqqanis as a proxy group.
Recently, Taliban insurgents publicly executed two women, one of them in a hotly disputed honor killing, in northern Afghanistan.
The killings, which were unrelated, took place in recent months in areas where Taliban presence has traditionally been weak. In one of the cases, a pregnant 22-year-old woman named Rabia, already the mother of two young children, was accused by her husband of adultery, tried and convicted by the Taliban on the spot, and then publicly shot three times.
In a separate development Saturday, NATO said two members of the international coalition in Afghanistan were killed in an attack on a base in southern Afghanistan. They were not immediately identified.
Though it has always nominally been a branch of the Taliban, the Haqqani network was seen as largely autonomous. But the selection of Sirajuddin Haqqani, the group’s chief, to become the deputy leader of the Taliban during a leadership struggle last summer has turned out to be far from a symbolic move, officials say.
“Sirajuddin increasingly runs the day-to-day military operations for the Taliban, and, we believe, is likely involved in appointing shadow governors,’’ said Brigadier General Charles H. Cleveland, the chief spokesman for US and NATO forces in Afghanistan.
Senior Afghan security officials say Sirajuddin Haqqani brings to the Taliban a more applied and lethal military expertise than the supreme leader of the group, Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour.
Mansour has been consumed with a campaign to quell dissent against his leadership, and he is said to have limited his movements and access since a reported attack on his life in Quetta, Pakistan. Accordingly, Sirajuddin Haqqani has stepped in, at times even running meetings of the Taliban leadership council, senior Afghan security officials said.
One senior Taliban commander in southern Afghanistan, speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid angering the leadership, said Sirajuddin Haqqani had been in “constant contact’’ with Taliban field commanders in the south and the north of the country, in addition to his stronghold in the southeast.
For any big surge of fighters or change of plans, the field commanders have to contact Sirajuddin Haqqani, the commander said.
A Taliban spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, confirmed Sirajuddin Haqqani’s elevated role, saying it was because of “his bravery.’’ He also said Haqqani’s role was more than military.
As the insurgency increasingly takes a Mafia-like shape, relying heavily on drug trafficking, according to the United Nations, the Haqqani network’s leaders also bring another vital resource: a proven fund-raising network. That, coupled with the Taliban’s manpower and territorial command, helps ensure a more diverse cash flow for the insurgency.
Over the past 30 years, the Haqqanis have developed complex streams of funding, analysts said. In addition to extortion and ransom-seeking, they also have diverse business investments in several countries through front companies.
The Haqqani network’s closer integration with the Taliban command also creates awkwardness for the Obama administration and is raising tension between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The State Department officially listed the Haqqanis as a terrorist group in 2012, and there is a $5 million US bounty on Sirajuddin Haqqani. (The department’s Rewards for Justice Program describes him as 43 years old and 5 feet 7 inches tall, with a complexion that is “light, with wrinkles.’’)
But the Afghan Taliban, as a group, have remained off that terrorist list, partly to ease the prospect of starting peace talks between them and the Afghan government — a process that US officials have been centrally involved in.
With the clear and public integration of the Haqqanis into the Taliban leadership over at least the past year, US officials have essentially been unable to dodge the claim that they are trying to broker talks with terrorists.
The Haqqani network, which traces its origin to the 1980s guerrilla war against the Soviets that was backed by the CIA, is seen as having close links with the Pakistani military spy service, Inter-Services Intelligence, known as ISI.
Indeed, some senior Afghan officials say the Pakistani military was central to bringing the Haqqanis more closely into the Taliban during the insurgency’s leadership councils last summer, which were held in Quetta.
Even as American and Afghan officials have demanded that Pakistan do what it can to limit the insurgent offensive this year, there has been little obvious result. The Taliban command or contest large swaths of Afghan territory, threaten important provincial capitals, and, through the Haqqanis’ bombing campaign, continue to create carnage and fear in Kabul, the capital.
