US Pressured Pakistan For Months To Get Taliban Chief Arrested

In tandem with our new offensive in Afghanistan, the big news in the CENTCOM theater of this war is the arrest of Taliban operations chief Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar by Pakistan earlier this month, which has just been made public.

This is a huge coup, no doubt - Baradar was essentially Mullah Omar's number two- but the back story is less encouraging, as the Wall Street Journal reveals:

Pakistan's capture of the Afghan Taliban's operations chief came after months of U.S. pressure that involved showing officials details of intelligence that linked Pakistan's spy agency to Taliban attacks in Afghanistan.{...}

The arrest came as a surprise for many U.S. officials—and possibly for the Taliban, too. U.S. officials have long complained that Pakistan consistently refused to act on American-provided intelligence about the whereabouts of the Taliban's supreme leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, as well as Mullah Baradar and other Taliban leaders.

As recently as October, an officer in Pakistan's spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that the Quetta Shura was an "American myth" and that no Taliban leaders spent any time in Pakistan. {...}

the U.S. presented what officials say was strong evidence that at least some ISI agents—a few of them senior—had told the Afghan Taliban about the movements and locations of NATO forces in Afghanistan.

ISI officers were also sitting in on Afghan Taliban leadership meetings and providing strategic guidance and logistical support to the group, the U.S. charged. There was also ample evidence of ISI funding of Taliban activities, the officials said.

With ISI officers attending meetings of the top Taliban leadership, the Pakistanis couldn't say they didn't know where Mullah Baradar was, said a former Defense Department official.

This is the typical Pakistani pattern. Cooperate with the Islamists and deny, deny, deny until Uncle Sam threatens to cut off the money spigot keeping the bankrupt, failed state alive. Then turn over a high level jihadi as a last resort to keep the cash flowing. Ex-VP Dick Cheney ran into exactly the same pattern when dealing with Pakistan, when it was with Musharraf or the current corrupt stooge, Asif Zardari, whose nickname in Pakistan is "Mr. Ten Per Cent."

We're pretty much forced to go along with the program at this point, thanks to our flawed Afghanistan policy. Almost 80% of the supplies for the NATO troops in that landlocked country come from the Pakistani port of Karachi and over the highway through the Torkhum Pass, and there's no other feasible way to get it there...unless we basically decide to cut Pakistan loose, improve our relationship with India and improve transit through the narrow Afghan-India border and ship through Baza'i Gonbad in the Vakhan region. The logistics are not impossible, but the politics are..especially given our current Islamic-friendly administration.

While doing this would insure us a supply line through friendly territory, it would involve our essentially recognizing India's claim to Jammu and Kashmir, a cause of seething emotions in the Muslim world almost as much as Israel's existence.

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