The United States had “removed the leader of an organization that has continued to plot against and unleash attacks on American and coalition forces,” President Barack Obama said in a statement, during a visit to Vietnam. “Mansour rejected efforts by the Afghan government to seriously engage in peace talks and end the violence that has taken the lives of countless innocent Afghan men, women and children.”
The strike hit Mansour in Pakistan’s province of Baluchistan — a rare location for U.S. drone strikes. Recent U.S. strategy has focused on allowing Afghan forces to carry out day-to-day operations against the Taliban. But Mansour represented a special threat to the United State and its forces, Obama said.
A U.S. defense official told Foreign Policy that the strike was “conducted under self-defense authorities,” since Mansour was “engaged in actions that directly threatened U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan.”
Mansour took charge of an increasingly fissured Taliban in July of 2015, after Afghan intelligence revealed that the previous leader, Mullah Omar, had been dead for two years.
The New York Times reports that Pakistani officials were alerted to the strike only after it happened, and the operation is “seen as a signal that the Obama administration was growing less patient with Pakistan’s failure to move strongly against the Taliban insurgency. While Pakistan’s powerful military establishment has quietly cooperated with the C.I.A.’s campaign of drone strikes against Al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban in the northwestern tribal areas, it has refused past requests from the spy agency to expand the drone flights into Baluchistan.”