Mullah’s arrest is ‘own goal’ for US

ON the face of it the capture of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taliban’s top strategist, as he came out of a madrasah in Karachi seemed a coup.

Jubilant American officials described it as a “game- changer, even more important than the battle in Marjah”, where 15,000 Nato and Afghan soldiers are engaged in their biggest offensive.

“A tremendous achievement for Pakistani intelligence and American collaboration,” crowed the US special representative Richard Holbrooke, in Islamabad last week for talks with Pakistani generals and President Asif Ali Zardari.

After years of handing Islamabad billions of dollars for co- operation in the war on terror, the combination of money and pressure seemed to be finally working.

Unidentified US officials quoted by The New York Times said Baradar was providing a “wealth of information”. His arrest was followed by a round-up in Quetta which netted two other senior Taliban figures, Mullah Abdul Salam and Mullah Mir Mohammad, said to be the shadow governors of the provinces of Kunduz and Baghlan.

While this was the first time Pakistan had acted against the Taliban leadership, Afghans involved in western-backed attempts to start talks with the Taliban to end the war were furious, warning that the arrest might have ruined chances of negotiations.

“It’s a spectacular own goal [for the US],” said one official. “They want to wreck talks,” said a close aide to Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai.

“Mullah Baradar was independently in contact with the Afghan government to find a way for reconciliation and the Pakistanis knew that from their secret agents.”

Baradar had participated in meetings, including one in Saudi Arabia with Karzai’s brother, Ahmed Wali. Other Taliban leaders are sceptical about talks, saying foreign troops must withdraw first.

“The timing of this arrest was very peculiar,” said Barmak Pazhwak, a senior official for Afghanistan and Pakistan at the United States Institute of Peace, a think tank. “The fact he was one of the key Taliban leaders advocating talks suggests the Pakistanis either want more control or to sabotage the process altogether.”

The arrest came days after Pakistan had publicly stated it needed a role in any negotiations. Pakistan has invested a lot in the Taliban, with whom it has worked for more than 20 years. Its military intelligence service, the ISI, helped them to take control of Afghanistan in the 1990s and its generals refer to the Taliban as “assets”.

“The ISI is arresting the Taliban leaders who are reconcilable,” said Idrees Khan, a human rights activist in Peshawar. “By doing this, they want to save them from being killed by those Taliban who don’t want to accept peace.”

After the arrest, US officials said Pakistan should have a place at the negotiating table. But some experts believe that Pakistan’s military has little interest in peace in Afghanistan because then they would no longer be needed by the US and the dollars would dry up.

They point out that the only previous senior Taliban figure to be arrested in Pakistan, Mullah Mansoor Dadullah, had also opened talks with Kabul.

Islamabad’s motive may be financial. Pakistan is bankrupt and the US had blocked $1.3 billion (£840m) of aid because of a dispute over a refusal to grant visas to American security officials. The first $349m tranche of this will be released next week following Baradar’s arrest.

Pakistan has received more than $12 billion in US aid since 2001, and in October the Obama administration agreed a further $7.5 billion over five years.

“I’m not sure I would read too much into this in terms of a major shift by Pakistan,” said Shuja Nawaz, an expert on the Pakistani military.

Others point to Pakistani intelligence co-operation in the recent deaths in a US missile strike in North Waziristan of Muhammad Haqqani, the 30-year-old son of Jalaluddin Haqqani and brother of Sirajuddin Haqqani, Afghan warlords with close links to Al-Qaeda.

Pakistan’s military has long-standing ties to the Haqqanis and previously resisted US pressure to act against them.

“This proves our sincerity in this fight,” said a senior ISI officer after the Haqqani killing. Others question what help they gave.

As always where Pakistan and the Taliban are concerned, the facts are murky.

One thing is clear: Pakistan can no longer claim the Taliban leadership is not in its country. The question is, if it can arrest Baradar, what about the others?