Good news out of the Afpak region, the Taliban second in command, Mullah Baradar, was captured in Karachi. This is notable in itself, and comes as the US is leading an ambitious effort to capture the Taliban stronghold of Marja, but I was particularly happy to hear that the raid was a joint effort by Pakistan’s secret service, the ISI, and the CIA. The ISI has for a long time played both sides of the Taliban and the US for reasons clear in this article, and I think it’s critical to get the Pakistanis to abandon the Taliban as a client and work with the US to deny them sanctuary. That means attacking their strongholds in the tribal regions, which they’ve done in the last few months, and have the intelligence agencies work together to go after high-value targets. Hopefully this raid is just the first wave of this. What if the next few months Marja falls and the Afghans seem to actually hold the city themselves and set up a semi-decent government while a joint US/Pakistan raid captures or kills Mullah Omar (who is said to be in Karachi)? That kind of thing could be a game-changer and would be some well-deserved good news for the Obama foreign policy team, which I think is actually doing a good job.
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afpak, foreign policy, mullah baradar, obama, taliban
Thinking a lot this weekend about Afghanistan. I just finished Dexter Filkin’s excellent book, “The Forever War“, and read the piece Filkin’s also had in this weekend’s NY Times Magazine on General Stanley McChrystal, who is in charge of the war in Afghanistan. He is requesting at least another 40,000 troops to win the war in Afghanistan. I have a hard time thinking about any compromise with the Taliban that puts them in charge and abandons the Afghan people to their brutal, primitive rule. But the US has been there for over 8 years now, and I doubt that we can (or should) build a modern state there, in particular with the corrupt Karzai government stealing elections and trafficking in narcotics. Obama has a tough call on his hands, but I think I’m against sending a large number of troops. I think the fight is in Pakistan and dealing with that country’s disfunction. I still feel that way, but reading Part I in journalist David Rhode’s kidnapping saga, I was struck by this section:
Over those months, I came to a simple realization. After seven years of reporting in the region, I did not fully understand how extreme many of the Taliban had become. Before the kidnapping, I viewed the organization as a form of “Al Qaeda lite,” a religiously motivated movement primarily focused on controlling Afghanistan.
Living side by side with the Haqqanis’ followers, I learned that the goal of the hard-line Taliban was far more ambitious. Contact with foreign militants in the tribal areas appeared to have deeply affected many young Taliban fighters. They wanted to create a fundamentalist Islamic emirate with Al Qaeda that spanned the Muslim world.
I’m not so sure we can strike a balance in trying to limit an extremist sanctuary and not have a huge number of troops there. Either way we are confronted by a series of bad decisions, it’s just a question of which one is worse.
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afghanistan, kidnapping, taliban, war