The Taliban’s top military commander has been arrested in a joint CIA-Pakistani operation in Pakistan in a major victory against the insurgents as US troops push into their heartland in southern Afghanistan, officials said yesterday.
Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the group’s No. 2 leader behind Afghan Taliban founder Mullah Mohammad Omar and a close associate of Osama bin Laden, was captured in the city of Karachi, two Pakistani intelligence officers and a senior US official said.
They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release such sensitive information.
One Pakistani officer said Baradar was arrested 10 days ago with the assistance of the US and “was talking” to his interrogators.
Baradar would be the most senior Afghan Taliban leader arrested since the beginning of the Afghan war in 2001.
His capture would represent a significant success for the administration of US President Barack Obama, which has vowed to kill or seize Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders. It follows the ramping up of CIA missile strikes against militant targets that have reportedly killed many mid-level commanders.
It was unclear how Baradar was tracked down. Pakistan’s spy agency has been accused in the past of protecting top Taliban leaders believed sheltering in the country, frustrating Washington.
Moving against Baradar could signal that Islamabad increasingly views the Afghan Taliban, or at least some of its members, as fair game.
There was also speculation that the arrest could be related in some way to a new push by the US and its NATO allies to negotiate with moderate Afghan Taliban leaders as a way to end the eight-year war in Afghanistan. Pakistan has an important role in that process because of its close links with members of the movement, which it supported before the Sept. 11 attacks.
“If Pakistani officials had wanted to arrest him, they could have done it at any time,” said Sher Mohammad Akhud Zada, the former governor of Afghanistan’s Helmand Province and a member of the Afghan parliament. “Why did they arrest him now?”
Baradar heads the Taliban’s military council and was elevated in the body after the 2006 death of military chief Mullah Akhtar Mohammed Usmani. He is known to coordinate the movement’s military operations throughout the south and southwest of Afghanistan. His area of direct responsibility stretches over Kandahar, Helmand, Nimroz, Zabul and Uruzgan provinces.
According to Interpol, Baradar was the deputy defense minister in the Taliban regime that ruled Afghanistan until it was ousted in the 2001 US-led invasion.
Karachi has been increasingly cited as a possible hiding place for top Afghan Taliban commanders in recent months. It has a large population of Pashtuns, the ethnic group that makes up the Taliban, but it is on the Arabian Sea and far from the Afghan border.
A Taliban spokesman in Afghanistan said that Baradar was still free, though he did not provide any evidence.
“We totally deny this rumor. He has not been arrested,” Zabiullah Mujahid said by telephone.
He said the report was Western propaganda aimed at undercutting the Taliban fighting against an offensive in the southern Afghan town of Marjah, a Taliban haven.
“The Taliban are having success with our jihad. It is to try to demoralize the Taliban who are on jihad in Marjah and all of Afghanistan,” he said.
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