PAKISTAN’S POWERFUL military is ready to move aggressively against the Taliban, it was claimed last night, after news broke that the organisation’s top military commander, Mullah Baradar, had been arrested in a dramatic operation in Karachi.
The shift in Pakistani policy could help nudge western countries towards a peace deal in Afghanistan, analysts and diplomats said, even if the idea of talks with the Taliban is in its infancy, with British and US policy still focused on fighting and splitting the movement.
The Pakistani military’s Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (ISI) and the CIA arrested Baradar (42) in a joint operation on the edge of the teeming port city on February 8th, security sources in Karachi said. His capture is a coup for the US, which is leading a sweeping anti-Taliban operation across the border in Helmand.
Baradar is a leading light of the Quetta shura, the Taliban governing council that directs the insurgency from the western Pakistani city of the same name. He is considered second only to the insurgents’ one-eyed fugitive leader, Mullah Omar.
Baradar has been intensively interrogated by Pakistani officials under US supervision and has started to provide information about the insurgency, US officials claimed after news of his arrest was broken by the New York Times.
It is a blow to the Taliban, but unlikely to be fatal: the insurgency has demonstrated remarkable resilience since 2001. But the arrest’s true significance, analysts said, was that it was led by the ISI, possibly signalling a major change in Pakistani policy towards the Afghan militants.
Although Pakistan severed its ties with the Taliban in 2001, US and British officials suspect the military has quietly retained some ties in the hopes of using the militants as a tool of influence once western troops leave Afghanistan. A western diplomat in Afghanistan described it as a “very complex relationship”.
“The big thing here is that ISI actually helped to get him. It shows that the Pakistani attitude to the Taliban is shifting,” said Kamran Bokhari, a US-based analyst with the Stratfor think tank. “The Pakistanis are co-operating. Obviously they are not co-operating for free. They are getting something from the Americans.”
Mr Bokhari said that in return for ISI co-operation the US may be pressing India to re-establish a dialogue with Pakistan that collapsed after the Mumbai terrorist attacks in November 2008. Senior diplomats from both countries are due to meet in New Delhi next week.
Yesterday US senator John Kerry visited Islamabad, where he offered to play a part in the resumption of dialogue. Indian officials insist the process was not a consequence of US pressure and have long resisted any foreign mediation in the Kashmir dispute, which they insist is a strictly bilateral matter.
But international impatience for a resolution of the Afghan war may be changing the regional calculus. In the aftermath of the London conference on Afghanistan on January 28th, British and American officials have ramped up an internal debate about the merits of peace talks with the Taliban, and whether it is preferable to engage the insurgents directly or send messages through Saudi or Pakistani mediators.
Two weeks ago the Pakistani army chief, Gen Ashfaq Kayani, gave briefings to reporters in which he described a peaceful Afghanistan as part of Pakistan’s “strategic depth” – words that encouraged diplomats and analysts to believe Pakistan’s approach to the Taliban was changing.
Since then, according to a western diplomat in Islamabad, Pakistan’s army has clearly signalled its willingness to facilitate talks between the US and the Taliban, probably through the ISI.
But he said the exact nature of the suggested role remained unclear, in particular whether Pakistan was suggesting it would deal directly with the militants or just facilitate contacts with western negotiators.– (Guardian service)