Taliban Capture Could Reduce Chances of Peace

So what do you do when you catch the number two commander of the Afghan Taliban, potentially by accident?

Apparently, if you are Pakistan, you report it as the sovereign result of increased intelligence assistance from America to support Pakistani interests. And if you are America, you package it as a critical turning point in Pakistani cooperation to deal with the Afghan Taliban.

Except that, according to the NY Times, it seems no one realized how big this fish was until they started checking wallets for Taliban photo ID cards. Enter Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar.

And now, it’s all a bit tricky. Because if the CIA or the Pakistani intelligence services knew Baradar was actually at this location, would they have gone through with the raid? Or, better said, should they have gone through with the raid?

According to some analysts, Baradar was the most senior level member of the Afghan Taliban who was potentially open to negotiate. Taliban expert and author, Ahmed Rashid, reports that Baradar had been to secret negotiation meetings held with Afghan government officials in Saudi Arabia. And UN officials say that it was Baradar who setup a meeting between the outgoing top UN official in Afghanistan, Kai Eide, and some mid-level Taliban commanders.

(I’ve often wondered how Afghan Taliban commanders travel to Saudi Arabia. And then once at the hotel resort, do they just show up at the conference room marked ‘UN-Taliban Dialogue’ with a scotch-taped sign ‘Please leave your Kalashnikov at the coat check’?)

In an article in the Christian Science Monitor, a former Pakistani Ambassador to Afghanistan said, “Mullah Baradar was talking peace. ... For the time being, there are no prospects for talks. I think it's now going to be a fight to the bitter end."

So if you accidentally arrest one of the bad guys who was potentially helping things become somewhat less bad, it seems like there is no good way out. Because if you quietly let him go before it was public, it’s likely to end up in the press at some point. And the prospect of the American media firestorm over some CIA-endorsed catch-and-release fishing operation with the number two Afghan Taliban commander seems less than pleasant.

But now if Baradar participates in some aims for peace after capture, he is tainted and marginalized, because none of his old friends knows what he said during interrogation. (Maybe it would have been easier to forget the raid idea and for America to start using missile-firing drones in urban Karachi. Yeah, that was a joke.)

In reality, the best plan for now could be for Pakistan to do what it has suggested is an option -- deport Baradar to Afghanistan and let the Afghan government figure out the way forward for its country.

Photo credit: isafmedia