Let's Not Dust Off that Mission Accomplished Banner Just Yet

by Eric Martin

As has been widely reported, U.S. forces - working in tandem with Pakistani intelligence official - recently captured one of the Taliban's top military commanders: Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar.  While this is potentially very good news for the Obama administration's efforts in Afghanistan, the extent of its significance will not be known for some time.  It could signal, at last, that Pakistan is serious about providing meaningful cooperation in the effort to combat the Afghan Taliban movement (which Pakistan has heretofore been sheltering and supporting). 

However, it is important not to jump to conclusions and presume that this one gesture by Pakistan represents full buy-in.  Along these lines, Spencer Ackerman lets optimism get the better of circumspection: 

2.  The Pakistanis will go after the Quetta Shura Taliban. Remember all those hand-wringing newspaper stories about the Pakistanis refusing to go after their old proxies in the Afghan Taliban?...If the so-called ‘Quetta Shura’ Taliban led by Omar thought the Pakistani military and intelligence service still had its back, that’s over, in a very dramatic way.[...]

3. The U.S-Pakistan relationship is working...The Baradar capture vindicates the Obama administration’s decision to hug Pakistan tightly, with a big new aid package and less public pressure, in the hopes of yielding complementary Pakistani security moves against the Taliban and al-Qaeda (more even than the bloody Swat and South Waziristan campaigns last year) down the road. If analysts were looking for a big, clear sign of Pakistani strategic intent — keep the Taliban on hand as an Afghan Plan B or throw in more heavily with the Americans? — here’s something big and clear.

While those scenarios are certainly possibilities (and would be good news for U.S. efforts in Afghanistan), it is also possible that Pakistan offered the Baradar chip as a one-off concession for various ulterior purposes - some better than others (more below). 

We shall know in the coming weeks and months.  If Pakistan is truly serious about rolling up the Quetta Shura (the council of Taliban leaders that have been taking refuge in Quetta, Pakistan while plotting attacks and strategy in Afghanistan, particularly the south), then we should see a steady stream of arrests and/or assassinations of high level Taliban figures in Pakistan.  After all, Pakistani intelligence likely has a very good idea of how and where to locate the Quetta Shura members (and other groups/individuals in Pakistan). In the alternative, if those Afghan leaders get chased back to Afghanistan, then they should presumably be easier for U.S. forces to target.

An absence of such a laundry list of kills/captures will be its own response to Spencer's optimistic take. 

In the meantime, let's look at some other possibilities:

1.  As Joshua Foust speculates, this could be a warning shot fired in the direction of Mullah Omar in order to compel him to negotiate a settlement with the Karzai government.  However, to get Pakistani cooperation in that effort would mean that Pakistan has been offered a seat at the negotiating table - or a way of ensuring that its influence in Afghanistan will not be greatly diminished while India's expands in any.  Steve Hynd quotes Arif Rafiq to expand on this theory:

Arif Rafiq suggests that the arrest is designed to force Omar to the negotiating table early, again something Pakistan sees as in its best interests. It's not that Pakistan has finally decided to wholeheartedly join America's war, it's that Afghanistan's Karzai and America have gradually moved towards a point where Pakistan can have its cake and eat it too.

Kayani’s overtures to the Karzai government possibly contained the following “implicit message” to the Afghan Taliban: “you are not our only option, so don’t take us for granted.”  And so the arrest of Baradar is perhaps part of an attempt by the Pakistan Army to induce behavioral change on the part of the Afghan Taliban, and particularly its obstinate leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar.  These desired changes likely include: giving up maximalist goals, such as the re-establishment of an emirate; and clear movement toward the bargaining table with Karzai and away from al-Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban.  And equally important, as Afghans have engaged in a multitude of secret peace talks in the region, the Pakistan Army would like to ensure that it, to the exclusion of India, is part of the glue that holds together any power sharing arrangement in Kabul.  In other words, it doesn’t want the Afghans to make their own peace and shut Pakistan out of the process.  If Pakistan were excluded, then what was the trouble of the past eight years for? [...]

With its contacts, geographic location, and new-found “responsible” approach, it’s Pakistan — not Iran, India, or Russia — that is positioned to play the role of stability guarantor in a post-American Afghanistan, especially as it pertains to U.S. interests.

2. Moving in a very different direction, there is a theory that Pakistan acted against Baradar because he was actually pursuing reconciliation in earnest - but apart from ISI control - and so they eliminated a potential independent actor that could limit their influence on proceedings.  Kevin Drum cites a Times article that states the following:

Whatever the case, with the arrest of Mullah Baradar, Pakistan has effectively isolated a key link to the Taliban leadership, making itself the main channel instead.

“We are after Mullah Baradar,” the Pakistani intelligence official said in an interview three weeks ago. “We strongly believe that the Americans are in touch with him, or people who are close to him.”

The official said the American action of excluding Pakistan from talks with the Afghan Taliban was making things “difficult.”

“You cannot say that we are important allies and then you are negotiating with people whom we are hunting and you don’t include us,” he said. [...]

An American intelligence official in Europe...[acknowledged] Mullah Baradar’s key role in the reconciliation process. “I know that our people had been in touch with people around him and were negotiating with him,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the issue.

“So it doesn’t make sense why we bite the hand that is feeding us,” the official added. “And now the Taliban will have no reason to negotiate with us; they will not believe anything we will offer or say.” [...]

“He was the only person intent on or willing for peace negotiations,” said Hajji Agha Lalai, former head of the government-led reconciliation process in the city of Kandahar, who has dealt with members of the Taliban leadership council for several years.

Adds Drum:

Naturally, this is all completely opaque. Apparently Pakistan is miffed that they've been left out of negotiations with the Taliban, and they want back in. Getting Baradar out of the picture might have simply been a chess move on their part to eliminate someone they didn't have any control over.

In keeping with this, there have been rumors surrounding prior strikes on Taliban figures that were, supposedly, more amenable to negotiated settlement.  The theories posited that such peacemakers were targeted due to the fact that their conciliatory actions were pursued outside of a framework preferred by Pakistan and/or the U.S., depending on the theorist's vantage point. 

3.  Juan Cole mentions another option: that Baradar had breached the firewall between Afghan Taliban and Pakistani Taliban operations.

My own suspicion is that Mullah Baradar was behind the violence against Shiites in Karachi this winter. Provoking Sunni-Shiite violence so as to destabilize Pakistan's financial and industrial hub would be a typical al-Qaeda tactic. The bombings succeeded in provoking major riots and property damage. But when you hurt stock prices and harm government revenues, you rather draw the attention to yourself of the country's elite and their security forces, since you have mightily inconvenienced them. As long as the Old Taliban were mainly bothering the government of Hamid Karzai over the border in Afghanistan, the ISI might have been able to turn a blind eye to them. But if they were going to cause billions of dollars of damage to Karachi, which they did this winter, that is intolerable.

4.  One also should not completely discount the possibility that the capture of Baradar is yet another example of Pakistani management of U.S. expectations: give just enough to keep the Americans with the program, but not too much so as to compromise core interests (this would work well with #2 or #3 above if Baradar had become a loose cannon in one way or another).  As Steve Hynd observed:

...Pakistan makes only enough moves to convince America to keep the pipeline of weapons and money flowing, while otherwise looking to its own interests. [...]

All of this is predicated on the supposition that Baradur stays detained and that his arrest wasn't just the old run of Pakistani security kabuki. The last time a Quetta Shura military chief was detained by Pakistan was in 2007, just as Dick Cheney arrived to pressure Pakistan to "do more". Two days later, Mullah Obaidullah Akhund was sitting with reporters, sipping coffee and entirely free.

Thus, as with all "breakthroughs" in the various manifestations of what has been termed the "long war," it is best not to celebrate prematurely, especially with so many possible layers of intrigue lurking behind the smiling face of long-awaited Pakistani-U.S. cooperation.  As I said, we'll have a better sense of the lay of the land soon enough.  Or not.

Comments

[Sapient]

Well, perhaps mission isn't accomplished but it certainly seems to be going well, with the news this morning of two more arrests. Obviously, there's a hard road ahead, but let's hope that this is the start of the "steady stream."

[someotherdude]

I remember the US was always capturing "senior leaders" during the genesis of the Iraqi civil war.

I think there were more "senior leaders" than soldiers.

[Mike]

Maybe it wasn't in July, August, or even December. But the end game now is obviously talks: ALL the players except the increasingly marginalized Secretary of State are blatantly signaling they precipitously came to that conclusion after engagement with the ground reality, whatever other rhetoric they may also be sustaining. Obama has for intents & purposes quietly began to end this war while convincing the necessary people he was expanding it (well, he did that too), but don't give him too much credit. It's now just a question of making sure Karzai doesn't get in the way of giving Pakistan what it wants & appeasing India.

I don't think it's Spencer-Ackerman-style optimism to say that this inveterate war-mongering surge supporter is pretty down with this.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123777455

http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/afghanistan/

http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2010/01/mcchrystals-change-of-heart.html

[Mike]

Sorry, 2nd link above intended to be:

http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2010/02/hitting-the-brick-wall-in-afghanistan-fb-ali.html

[Eric Martin]

Sapient: I saw that this morning too. Sure looks like this is picking up momentum - building on Mike's point.

Someotherdude: I think that the serial capture of #2 and #3 had more to do with al-Qaeda than Iraq.

Still, cautious, but now cautiously optimistic.

[Eric Martin]

Although it should be noted that those regional commanders were not Quetta Shura members.