What does the Baradar arrest mean?

By Shashank Joshi for RUSI.org

In a trickle that gave way to a deluge, the news emerged over the first half of February 2010 that Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a so-called 'Number Two' in the Afghan Taliban, had been arrested in Pakistan. The arrest, carried out by Pakistani and American spies, appeared to produce a slew of 'actionable intelligence', with officials indicating considerable displeasure that the news had leaked. Coming on the heels of tactical success in Marjah, and the detainment or killing of Taliban provincial governors, Baradar's arrest was repeatedly said to herald a breakthrough in the Washington-led efforts to disrupt the seven-year-old Afghan insurgency. But a more considered look at the evidence suggests that the arrest means far less than has been claimed. It indicates neither a Pakistani break with militancy, nor an easing of the path ahead for Western troops in Afghanistan and efforts to mop up the sprawling networks of terror and insurgency in the region.

The Times reported that Baradar was one of 'the handful of senior Taliban who evaded capture in 2001'. This seems to be incorrect. The New York Times, citing Northern Alliance officials, recalled that in 'November 2001, as Taliban forces collapsed after the American invasion, Mullah Baradar and several other senior Taliban leaders were captured by Afghan militia fighters aligned with the United States'. In a story that is depressingly familiar to those who have followed the trajectory of the Afghan War, 'Pakistani intelligence operatives intervened, and Mullah Baradar and the other Taliban leaders were released'. It is precisely the seeming differences between 2001 and 2010, Pakistan's acquiescence and cooperation, which have prompted a great deal of the recent optimism. Is this warranted?

The hitherto orthodox view is that Baradar's capture represents a meaningful transformation in how Pakistan looks at militant groups. As noted Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid has documented, the Taliban, nurtured by the Pakistani state in the 1990s as a strategic asset for use against India, were given refuge in Pakistan even after January 2002 (when President Musharraf delivered a landmark speech renouncing terrorism in order to defuse a standoff with India). Even after the Pakistani Taliban crystallised as a major threat to the state, killing Benazir Bhutto as now seems likely and taking many thousands of Pakistani lives, there were consistent reports that elements of the security establishment were extending support to other strands of the Taliban. Islamabad continued to distinguish between militant groups that presented a direct threat to the state, and those that could be safely ignored or abetted in the hope that they would supply manpower for attacks on India or ensure Pakistani interests would be represented in Kabul.

Last year, the New York Times documented 'money, military supplies and strategic guidance to Taliban commanders', and reported 'evidence that ISI operatives met regularly with Taliban commanders to discuss whether to intensify or scale back violence before the [December 2009] Afghan elections'. Scores of anonymous briefings in news reports testify to the ever-increasing frustration of American officials with their Pakistani counterparts, to the point where one journalist invoked 'a bad marriage in which both spouses have long stopped trusting each other, but would never think of breaking up because they have become so mutually dependent'.

Yet after Baradar was captured - rather than ignored, released, or informed of the operation - it was widely reported that 'American officials have said they have seen indications that the Pakistani military and spy services may finally have begun to distance themselves from the Taliban'. Pakistan has undertaken major military operations against the Pakistani Taliban in recent years and suffered recurrent terrorist attacks of rising lethality. Its security agencies and government, likely to be fractured in their motivations and under intense pressure from Washington, may have decided that the Balochistan-based Quetta Shura (the Taliban's leadership council) presents either a tactical threat to US largesse or a strategic threat to the stability of the country, particularly as Taliban leaders relocate to a major urban centre like Karachi, itself the site of rising sectarian violence. If this is the case, then the Pakistani operation directly addresses the problem pinpointed by the former US ambassador in Kabul, Karl Eikenberry, who wrote in a November 2009 telegram to Washington that 'Pakistan will remain the single greatest source of Afghani instability so long as the border sanctuaries remain'.

Overstating the case

But there are at least several other interpretations of Baradar's arrest. B. Raman, the former head of counterterrorism for India's foreign intelligence service, cited police sources in Karachi to paint the move as a 'manoeuvre by the ISI to discard the well-identified leaders of the Afghan Taliban and usher in a new leadership consisting of well-motivated and well-trained recruits of recent vintage, who have not yet come to the notice of the US agencies'. Another more speculative scenario mooted was that 'given the fact that [Baradar] was arrested in Karachi - and not Quetta, Peshawar or the tribal areas - it could well have been a CIA operation that led to his capture. Since it would be impolitic to present it as such, a convenient cover story of a joint operation becomes necessary'; but this does not seem to be borne out by the fact of continuing Pakistani detainment of Baradar.

More suggestive is the fact that Baradar was among the Taliban leaders seen as an important interlocutor in negotiations to co-opt the group into Afghanistan's political fabric, a strategy firmed up at the January London Conference and widely seen to have enhanced Pakistan's influence over the Afghan state. The arrest likely strengthens Islamabad's hand, after complaints that it had been sidelined from such discussions. This would be particularly so if Baradar was an interlocutor favoured by Karzai over Pakistani quasi-proxies. Indeed, the ensuing arrest of many of the Quetta Shura could be interpreted as Pakistan seeking to retain influence over the pace and direction of negotiations. In addition, The New York Times quoted officials as far apart as Islamabad, Washington and Kabul as arguing that the 'ISI's goal seems to be to weaken the Taliban just enough to bring them to the negotiating table, but leaving them strong enough to represent Pakistani interests in a future Afghan government', an endgame sharply at odds with the Afghan state envisioned by many regional actors such as Iran, Russia, and India.

And yet, nearly all of this speculation seems to be quite off the mark. The New York Times reported that 'new details of the raid indicate that the arrest of the Number Two Taliban leader was not necessarily the result of a new determination by Pakistan to go after the Taliban, or a bid to improve its strategic position in the region' but rather 'something more prosaic', because Baradar was not known to be at the location, and indeed was identified only after some time. As a US official put it, this was a 'lucky accident', albeit one quickly exploited by Islamabad.

Bruce Riedel also suggested 'the Pakistanis have a delicate problem with Baradar' because 'he might reveal something embarrassing about relations between the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistani government or ISI', something which might explain their guardedness about Baradar after the arrest.

In other words, neither Machiavellian conniving nor Damascene conversion explains Pakistan's behaviour.  In light of the hopes pinned on the incident, this deflates much of the optimism about the orientation of Pakistan's security establishment. Daniel Markey of the Council on Foreign Relations is correct to label this 'tactical level cooperation [which] may not be indicative of a higher-order shift in intention on the Pakistani side'. In conjunction with Pakistan's unwillingness to hand Baradar over to the US or let US interrogators quiz him, we are left with almost no reasons to suppose that Pakistan has made a clean break with the Taliban.

Grounds for caution

Nor does Baradar's removal from the scene mean that the insurgency in Afghanistan will fade.

Many commentators have drawn the conclusion that the arrest is 'likely to be of significantly more influence on the evolution of the war in Afghanistan than any number of military operations such as that currently underway in Helmand'. This seriously underestimates the fluid and decentralised structure of the insurgency, and the existence of other conduits for Pakistani influence.

In the North, the Hizb-i-Islami Gulbuddin (HIG), led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, might field as many combatants as the Taliban (with whom it is affiliated). It has exacted a severe toll on the Western coalition. Further south, and technically part of the Taliban, is the Haqqani Network (HN). The group, once funded extravagantly by the United States, has fostered in Waziristan an infrastructure of bases and logistics used by Al-Qa'ida and others. It was thought to have introduced suicide bombing to Afghanistan, and is seen as the largest threat to US forces in the east of Afghanistan. It likely played a major role in the bombing of a CIA base in Khost in December 2009, killing seven Americans, and in the attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul in the 2008. These groups operate with varying levels of independence from the core Taliban, and often in distinct geographical areas. Indeed, Antonio Giustozzi speaks of 'thousands of small armed groups loyal to petty military commanders spread around Afghanistan'. Those groups have shifting allegiances, and are able to flexibly rebound from setbacks like those of February 2010.

Any analysis that does not understand the ongoing role of these and other such sources of insurgency is likely to miss the bigger picture. Taliban collapse is not imminent. Of late, we have seen vastly overstated claims that Afghanistan is no longer deteriorating, despite the head of US military intelligence stating last year that 'the Afghan insurgency can sustain itself indefinitely'. This is not to suggest that Baradar did not play a major role, but that the Taliban has proved resilient and adaptable. It is dangerously wishful thinking to assume that even the severe degradation of the Quetta Shura will quell the 'neo-Taliban' movement flecked across the territory of Afghanistan.

A second problem is that Baradar's capture will complicate the newly favoured strategy of negotiating with the Taliban. Not only was he an important channel for negotiations, but the elimination of the veteran leadership of the Taliban risks empowering younger fighters in the lower echelons, driven more by ideology, less susceptible to influence from Afghanistan, under less unified command, and more likely to operate autonomously. This may produce either weakness or resilience, but there is certainly evidence to suggest that any residual trust between militants and their potential interlocutors may have evaporated. A more decentralised insurgency also means that a negotiated solution is placed further out of reach if the number of potential spoilers, elements out of the leadership's orbit, rises.

Finally, the Pakistani state is, like its Western counterparts, a machine of many moving parts. The latest episode underscores how, even were Pakistan to desire the complete attrition of all militant groups (which it presently does not), executive power in Pakistan faces competing centres of gravity. After Pakistan's Interior Ministry agreed in principle to extradite Baradar to Afghanistan, an Islamist campaigner filed a petition that led to a provincial high court blocking the transfer. The Financial Times subsequently noted 'a tendency among Islamists to use Pakistan's increasingly robust civil society, the media and the courts to press their case', a trend that might be politically encouraging but, in this and related cases, hinders regional counterterrorism and counterinsurgency.

That Mullah Baradar is no longer on the scene may seem an unmitigated good, demonstrating a volte-face in Pakistan and a first stride in the decapitation of the Taliban. But the commentariat, seeking to extract good news after a torrid year of war, has read far too much into an arrest that was a remarkable accident, and not indicative of a comprehensive rethink amongst military elites in Rawalpindi and Islamabad. Pakistan's acknowledgement that the Taliban is based on its soil was an admission that would be encouraging only if it had not been belated by almost a decade. Pakistan will remain the most ambivalent of allies, even as it continues to be one of the world's most severe victims of terrorism. The flexibility of the 'neo-Taliban', the enduring presence of other militant groups in Afghanistan, and the removal of a key Taliban negotiator all strongly suggest that the trajectory of the insurgency will continue to disappoint the war-weary.