By Kavita Mistry 
Benazir Bhutto “planned to collaborate with the U.S. against the mujahideen if she returned to power. Her return was designed at the behest of the Americans as they had given her a plan against the Mujahideen-e-Islam,” Mufti Noor Wali Mehsud wrote in his 2017 book about the assassination of the former Pakistan Prime Minister in December 2007. Then a mid-level leader of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), Mehsud claimed that the TTP was behind the killing. “Bomber Bilal first fired at Benazir Bhutto from his pistol and the bullet hit her neck. Then he detonated his explosive jacket and blew himself up among the participants of the procession,” Mehsud recounted in the book, titled Inqilab-e-Mehsud, South Waziristan: Firangi Raj se Amreeki Samraj Tak (Mehsud Revolution, South Waziristan: From British Raj to American Imperialism).
Eleven years after Benazir was killed, Mehsud would rise to become the emir of the TTP, and overseeing a rapid expansion of the group’s operations inside Pakistan. Earlier this month, Pakistan carried out air strikes in Kabul, reportedly targeting Mehsud, a UN-designated terrorist. He survived. But the strikes triggered the worst cross-border clashes between Pakistan and the Afghan Taliban in years, leaving dozens dead. A Qatar-brokered ceasefire halted the fighting, for now, but the relations between former patron and client remain tense, largely because of the power and influence Mehsud commands.
Born on June 26, 1978, in South Waziristan’s Tiarza region, Noor Wali Mehsud hails from the Mechikhel sub-clan of the Pashtun Mehsud tribe. He received Islamic education at various madrasas in Faisalabad, Gujranwala, and Karachi throughout the 1990s. After the Taliban captured Kabul in 1996, he crossed the Durand Line, the colonial-era Pakistan-Afghan border which he describes as “an unnatural and cruel line”, to join the Taliban in their fight against Ahmad Shah Massoud’s Northern Alliance. He returned to Pakistan in the late 1990s to complete his madrassa education, but went back to Afghanistan after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
The fall of the Taliban regime in Kabul later that year, following the U.S. invasion, deprived the militants — the Taliban, Pashtun fighters from Pakistan and al-Qaeda — of their safe haven. They retreated to Pakistan’s tribal areas, where they found refuge. By 2004, the Pakistani army had launched a crackdown across the tribal belt to flush out al-Qaeda and other foreign militants (Ansars). The campaign provoked widespread resentment among locals. According to Mehsud, Pakistan’s demand that the tribes hand over the militants was violated the tribal principle of malmastia (hospitality). The army’s assault triggered what he calls a ‘defensive jihad’ by the Mehsud tribe, one of the worst affected. In 2007, the Tehreek-e-Taliban (TTP) was formally announced, under the leadership of Baitullah Mehsud.
Dual policy
Pakistan pursued a dual policy at the time: it sheltered the Afghan Taliban, who were driving a deadly insurgency in Afghanistan against both the Islamic Republic and the U.S. troops, while mounting a brutal crackdown in its tribal regions against the Pakistani Taliban (TTP). Wali Mehsud was the deputy of Khaled Mehsud, leader of the powerful Mehsud tribal faction within the TTP. When Khaled was killed, he became the face of the Mehsud tribe within the group. In 2018, after the killing of TTP chief Mullah Fazlullah in a drone strike, Mehsud was appointed the emir. The group was largely in retreat. Fazlullah’s efforts to centralise control had backfired, prompting several factions to break away.
Hailing from the Yousafzai clan of Pashtuns from Swat, Fazlullah lacked support among the Mehsuds, the tribe that dominated the TTP ranks. With Wali Mehsud’s ascent, the TTP leadership returned to the Mehsud tribe. He set about unifying splintered factions and rebuilding a group that had fallen into disarray. He also adopted a looser, federal model, giving autonomy to local commanders to operate under the broad TTP umbrella. The TTP issued a new manifesto, prioritising attacks on Pakistan’s security personnel rather than civilians (TTP until then had carried some of the worst terror attacks in Pakistan, including the 2014 Peshawar school massacre). It dropped calls for “greater jihad” and stated their enemy was the Pakistani military and their backers. “Our fight is only in Pakistan, and we are at war with the Pakistani security forces…We are hoping to take control of the Pakistani tribal border regions and make them independent,” Mehsud said in an interview in 2021.
Between 2018 and 2021, Mehsud’s focus was on rebuilding the jihadist machinery. In 2021, the Taliban’s return to Kabul in August 2021 served as a morale booster for the militants across the region, including the TTP. “The Afghan Taliban victory is a victory for the entire Muslim people. Our relations are based on brotherhood, sympathy, and Islamic principles,” Mehsud declared. He claimed that the Afghans have “defeated the great tyrant of modern times [the U.S.] and his slaves, and crowned the entire Islamic Ummah and especially the Mujahid and Ghazi Afghan people.”
For Mehsud, the Taliban’s supreme leader is his “Ameer” — a reflection of the deep ideological bond between the two groups. He has asserted that his “jihad” carries the endorsement of hundreds of Deobandi clerics. “Our war is for the supreme word of Allah,” he once said. Mehsud’s worldview mirrors that of the Afghan Taliban. The TTP seeks to implement its strict Islamic code across Pakistan’s tribal regions, enforcing total segregation of men and women in public places. Mufti Mehsud wants to achieve what Mullah Omar and Mullah Akhundzada (the Afghan Taliban’s founding and current leaders) have achieved in Afghanistan.
Return with vengeance
Over the past four years, the TTP has intensified attacks in Pakistan, particularly in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. If the Afghan Taliban could defeat “the great tyrant” (the U.S.) in 20 years, the TTP seems determined to fight a long war against the Pakistani army. “Our real war is against the army. Political governments are… the slaves of the army,” Mehsud said in a 2022 interview, referring to his enemy. A resurgent TTP deepened the security anxieties of Pakistan, which blames the Afghan Taliban for sheltering Mehsud and his tribal jihadists.
By striking various provinces of Afghanistan earlier this month, in response to growing militant attacks, Islamabad-Rawalpindi is trying to hold Kabul accountable for the actions of the TTP. Yet, it was Pakistan’s own military campaigns in the tribal belt that gave birth to the TTP in the first place. This leaves Pakistan, which celebrated the Taliban’s return to Kabul in 2021, in limbo. Doing nothing, or seeking peace with the TTP would signal weakness and allow the militants to regroup. But continued military attacks, both in Pakistan tribal regions and across the Afghan border, risk not just alienating the Pashtun population further but also turning the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan into open hostility. Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir’s Pakistan seems to have chosen the latter.