Asia

Home page

Asia

Taliban capture signals shift by Pakistan: analysts

17 February 2010 02:25 (UTC +04:00)

Baku â€“ APA. Pakistan’s reported capture of the Taliban’s top commander, with CIA help, would represent a dramatic shift after years protecting leaders of a militia that served as its proxy in Afghanistan, analysts said Tuesday, APA reports citing AFP.

The New York Times reported late Monday that Mullah Abdul Ghani Barader was captured in Karachi last week in a secret operation carried out by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) and the Central Intelligence Agency.

"It’s a clear signal to the Afghan Taliban commanders in Pakistan: Things have changed. You’ve got to make a choice, either you are going to continue fighting and it’s going to be without our help, or you make a deal," said Arturo Munoz, a former CIA officer.

Without confirming Barader’s arrest, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs hailed the increased cooperation with ISI, a military intelligence arm that helped create the Taliban in the 1990s and has maintained contacts with it ever since. "We’ve seen an increase in Pakistani pushback on extremists in their own country, which I think is beneficial not simply for us," Gibbs said.

Not everyone is convinced that the ISI has now made a decisive turn against its former allies, and it remains to be seen how long the new spirit of cooperation will last.
Paul Pillar, a former top CIA analyst, told AFP that Barader’s arrest, while a departure, fit a Pakistani intelligence pattern of making only "incremental" concessions to US pressure.

"Does it mean the ISI is fully on board? I doubt it," said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer who last year led a White House review of Afghan strategy. But he said, "it’s... a significant step in the right direction."

And no one doubts the arrest was a huge coup for Washington, which has turned up the pressure on Pakistan over the past year as it has surged forces into Afghanistan to stem a deteriorating security environment.
Retired general Jim Jones, the national security adviser and the latest in a long line of top officials to travel to Islamabad, was in Pakistan last week around the time of Barader’s arrest.
A former top security official in the Taliban regime, he ascended to the number two spot after the 2001 US-led invasion that forced out Mullah Omar. He said the capture also was a victory for the broader US campaign in Afghanistan, which has struggled against Pakistan’s reluctance to move against the Taliban’s safe havens. He said Pakistan’s military leaders have concluded after fighting local Taliban militants inside Pakistan that they were inextricably linked with the Afghan Taliban, "and you really couldn’t move against one and not the other."