The capture of the Afghan Taliban's No. 2 commander by a joint CIA and Pakistani team dealt a fresh blow to insurgents under heavy U.S. attack and raised hopes that Pakistani security forces are ready to deny Afghan militant leaders a safe haven.
Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar's arrest in the Pakistani port city of Karachi may also push other insurgent leaders thought to be sheltering on this side of the border toward talks with the Afghan government -- a development increasingly seen as key to ending the eight-year war.
Baradar, in his late 40s, was the second in command behind Taliban founder Mullah Mohammad Omar and was said to be in charge of the day-to-day running of the organization's leadership council, which is believed based in Pakistan. He was a founding member of the Taliban and is the most important figure of the hard-line Islamist movement to be arrested in the war.
Baradar, who also functioned as the link between Mullah Omar and field commanders, has been in detention for more than 10 days and was talking to interrogators, two Pakistani intelligence officials said yesterday. One said that several other suspects were also captured in the raid. He said that Baradar had provided "useful information" to them and that Pakistan had shared it with their U.S. counterparts. They spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information.
The White House declined to confirm Baradar's capture. Spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters that the fight against extremists involves sensitive intelligence matters and that he believes it's best to collect that information without talking about it.
Former members of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and security experts said that the arrest would hurt the Taliban but was far from a decisive blow. They said that Baradar would likely be quickly replaced and that local commanders had a lot of autonomy from the leaders based in Pakistan.
Nevertheless, the capture is likely to cause short-term disruption, since Baradar was the day-to-day commander of the Taliban and his successor would not have the same prestige.
"It's a great tactical success that the coalition forces should be pleased with, but by no means is it the beginning of the end," said Will Hartley, an analyst at Jane's Terrorism and Insurgency Center in London.
Pakistan helped create the Taliban and supported the militants' regime in Afghanistan before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, when threats from Washington forced Islamabad to disavow the group.
But Pakistan's spy agencies have long been accused of protecting top Afghan Taliban leaders -- many of whom are believed to have fled to Pakistan during the U.S.-led invasion -- to use them as tools to counter Indian influence in Afghanistan when the Americans withdraw.
U.S. and Pakistani officials did not say what led them to Baradar or give details of the raid, prompting speculation that he may have been handed over by Pakistani intelligence officials as part of a trade off in negotiations over the future of Afghanistan or betrayed by other members of the Taliban.
"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?"
The arrest could mark a shift in strategy by Pakistan's powerful Inter Services Intelligence agency from protecting or turning a blind eye to the Afghan Taliban to arresting them.
"The Pakistani government have realized that the Taliban is too much of a threat to them, they've decided they've got to draw some red lines for both Pakistani and Afghanistan Taliban," said Michael Clarke, the director of the Royal United Services Institute, a military research group in London. "They decided they need to be seen to take the Taliban on, they need to push them back."
Washington will be hoping that is true.
"It's really evidence of a stronger cooperative effort that's taking place," Sen. John Kerry, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told CBS' The Early Show from Islamabad, where he was on an unrelated visit when news of the capture broke.
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