Top Taliban commander captured (UPDATED)

The New York Times is reporting that Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the most senior Taliban official after Mullah Omar, has been captured in a joint U.S.-Pakistani intelligence operation. (h/t Leah Farrall on Twitter)

Mullah Baradar has been in Pakistani custody for several days, with American and Pakistani intelligence officials both taking part in interrogations, according to the officials.

It was unclear whether he was talking, but the officials said his capture had provided a window into the Taliban and could lead to other senior officials. Most immediately, they hope he will provide the whereabouts of Mullah Omar, the one-eyed cleric who is the group’s spiritual leader.

Disclosure of Mullah Baradar’s capture came as American and Afghan forces were in the midst of a major offensive in southern Afghanistan.

His capture could cripple the Taliban’s military operations, at least in the short term, said Bruce O. Riedel, a C.I.A. veteran who last spring led the Obama administration’s Afghanistan and Pakistan policy review.

Details of the raid remain murky, but officials said that it had been carried out by Pakistan’s military spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, and that C.I.A. operatives had accompanied the Pakistanis.

This is undeniably good news, particularly in light of what looks like extensive cooperation from Pakistan. I'm not sure I'm ready to say that the ISI has turned the page here, but it's certainly a step in the right direction. In related news, for the first time ever, Michael Cohen is more optimistic about Afghanistan than me.

Not only is this enormous as far as the US war in Afghanistan, but it suggests for perhaps the first time that the Pakistan government is willing to cooperate with the US in going after the Afghan Taliban. One can only imagine the impact on Taliban feelings of security and reliance on Pakistani support: that safe haven ain't feeling so safe anymore. One has to think this will affect the drive toward political reconciliation in a dramatic way - because if you're the Taliban this news suggests that time is no longer necessarily on your side.

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say this may be the most important to thing to happen to the US war in Afghanistan - as Leah Farrell suggests this might be the more significant US capture since 9/11. This has the potential to change the entire complexion of the war in Afghanistan - and for the better. For the first time in a very long time, there is reason for optimism.

Let's cross our fingers that he's right. I don't see how it changes a lot of foundational dynamics of the war (including the cost-benefit analysis that underlies American involvement in Afghanistan), but if we're gonna be there, we may as well be shutting down the bad guys.

UPDATE: Here's a good backgrounder on Baradar from Newsweek last summer.

Giving the Taliban Ink by the Barrel

Go read Scott Wilson's article in the Post today discussing the Administration's developing policy on how to handle the Taliban in Afghanistan - it's a pretty good synopsis of the current issues and friction points in the debate. However, in addition to validating Michael Cohen's Afghanistan Mission Creep Watch (somehow defeat, disrupt, and dismantle al Qaeda translates into preserving a corrupt government engaged in what is essentially a civil war), there was another statement in this article that bothered me.

Wilson is not the first to report on this (and it's actually old news) and Wilson hits on the problem, but it keeps bothering me. I do not like this transfer of units from the countryside into the towns and cities, ceding that terrain to the enemy. So while we complain about the safehaven that the Taliban enjoys in Pakistan, we are going to hand over to them a large safehaven inside of Afghanistan itself from which to launch attacks on population centers.

But this problem goes beyond military operations. Counterinsurgency is about governance. If we remove coalition forces from the countryside the likelihood of the Afghan government governing effectively there is slim. Gee, who could fill that political vacuum? Oh right, the Taliban who has experience in this and being local actors are more likely to be well received in these regions. Instead of creating ink spots in urban areas, we'll be giving the Taliban their own ink spots from which to expand their own influence and governance. This will be exasperated when attacks from the countryside will cause turmoil in the cities. It will make the less than perfect, but relatively calm Taliban governed areas look pretty nice in comparison.

Even with the addition of 40,000 troops, we won't be able to effectively control the cities and the countryside. It will be a battle of our ink spots versus theirs and I don't know how well that will turn out.

(Editorial note: apologies for the dearth of posting - that whole day job thing has been keeping me pretty busy. Thanks to Gulliver for keeping up the momentum!)

(Also, apparently I shouldn't post before I've had my coffee. Otherwise words like "barrell" sit in the title all day.)

Back to you, Bernard

I recently had an exchange with Bernard Finel in the comments section of his blog about the purported effectiveness of the Taliban as an insurgent group, and by extension, the ineffectiveness of the ANSF. He responded in a separate post to some questions that I posed, and I keep promising to get back to him. Now that I've waited so long as to let his post fall off the front page, I figure I'll deal with his responses here. Check out the whole post on Bernard's blog, though, as I haven't reproduced the entire exchange here. (My questions in bold, and his responses set off as quotations.)

1) What do you mean when you say that “the Taliban and associates are so effective”? Why are you certain that this is true?

I’d say that results suggest the Taliban is more effective. With less money and fewer men that ISAF/ANA they have steadily expanding their reach in the country. While Joshua Foust is probably correct that the ICSD report that the Taliban has a permanent presence in 80% of the country is likely an overstatement, I don’t think anyone doubts that the Taliban has widening its operational area. The insurgent forces seem to act with a high degree of self-sufficiency. They are continuing to function even in areas that are ostensibly under coalition control. And remember, the Taliban presence in the country was rebuilt after the shattering defeats of 2001-2002. In short, while we seem to be having an inordinate amount of trouble building reliable Afghan forces capable of accomplishing their assigned missions, the Taliban and associated networks have been able to build a force capable of acting in most of Afghanistan in a disciplined fashion to implement what seems to be a coherent strategy.

I admit this is a subjective assessment. And I am willing to be convinced otherwise, but on the whole the insurgents seem to more effective that the Afghan security forces.

I'm not really that familiar with the data on this, so I don't know if "the Taliban [is] widening its operational area" or not -- it's all anecdotal. Acting "with a high degree of self-sufficiency" and "continuing to function even in areas that are ostensibly under coalition control" seem to me to be hallmarks of an extant insurgency, not signs that it is growing in power or reach.

Yes, it's clearly true that we're having difficulty building effective enough ANSF quickly enough to combat the insurgency. Building security forces from whole cloth is an expensive and time-intensive process, particularly when that newly established military must be tailored to confront threats very different from the ones our military has trained, equipped, organized, and educated itself to do. Insurgent groups don't face the same sort of obstacles for the simple reason that they don't require institutions, at least not at this stage of the insurgency. The Taliban need only figure out what's effective in combat and replicate it, adapting as necessary.

In summary, I don't think it's at all clear that Taliban forces are objectively more capable than ANSF, only that their circumstances confer certain advantages that allow for tactical (even if geographically broad) success.

2) If we do accept your assertion that the insurgents are more effective than the ANSF: isn’t it fair to say that what is required for insurgents to be considered “effective” is considerably less difficult to achieve than what we’d need to see to assign such a label to the ANSF?

I agree, and I have indeed argued that “Insurgencies, once established, run downhill. Counter-insurgencies, always, run uphill.” But there two caveats. First, “once established” is a significant qualifier as our good friend Che might have acknowledged. There was nothing inevitable about the Taliban resurgence. Having ruled brutally before being been chased from power after having provoked a foreign intervention, it would seem the Taliban would have an uphill battle to become again a significant force. They are not receiving significant foreign support. When the history of the Taliban is written far in the future, when passions have cooled, and the issue is studied purely as a matter of military history I suspect people are going to recognize in the recovery of the Taliban an instance of a movement/insurgency that is rare for its resilience. The point is, that yes, insurgencies have some structural advantages, but nonetheless, I think we have to acknowledge that thus far the Taliban is proving itself to be more effective than most historic insurgencies.

Second, saying that it is easier to be an insurgent does not mean it is easy. I admit, I don’t wholly understand why the Taliban — and affiliates — is able to operate outside of Pashtun areas. But I think some observers subscribe to a caricature that portrays the Taliban as just a bunch of thugs and killers. They are that, certainly. But from what I can tell — and I happy to be corrected on this score if I am wrong — they seem to using a relatively sophisticated operational concept. They are blowing stuff up, yes. And threatening “collaborators.” But they are also, somehow positioning themselves as an anti-corruption and nationalist movement. They represent more than just a coercive force. So while being an insurgent is potentially easier, just as we hope to “live among the people” and build institutions, I think Taliban fighters are also similarly required to balance military and political action. Indeed, it is this ability that, I think, explains part of what make them such a challenge, unlike, say, AQI which was just a source of insecurity. Anyway, long story short. Creating insecurity is easy. But generating a successful insurgency requires more than that… and I suspect that if we captured Mullah Omar’s IN guidance, it would at least mirror some of McChrystal’s COIN guidance.

I agree, there was nothing inevitable about the Taliban's return to prominence. But let's also be clear about the fact that they are not close to returning to power as a government, even in the limited geographical range where they held power in 2001. And let's also be clear about the fact that roughly seven years of relative coalition inattention has permitted a resurgence in certain limited areas.

As you know, and as you allude to in this post, parties to a civil war that can be seen to have success find it much easier to gain control and support, so it's perfectly reasonable that the insurgents' success in some under-resourced areas to which we've paid little attention would snowball regionally or nationally. This isn't due to a failure of the ANSF as a tactical force, but rather to a failure of strategic and operational planning. The prior administration actively resisted the stand-up of capable ANSF for several years, and there weren't sufficient numbers of coalition troops to pacify the countryside unilaterally. This, really, is an answer to the broader question (if we do accept that the Taliban are more capable, which I don't, exactly): the Taliban have had a few years' head start.

I still don't accept the assertion that any progress made by the Taliban is directly attributable to any unique capabilities or appeal, but rather believe that they've successfully made use of both structural advantages and specific geographic ones: insurgencies thrive in mountainous areas and other difficult terrain, in places where population density is sparse and villages and towns isolated from one another, and in areas that lack modern transportation infrastructure. These realities obtain in basically all of the places that the insurgency has met with significant success.

It is absolutely true that the Taliban "represent more than just a coercive force." It's widely understood that the Taliban's provision of law courts and consistent justice is something that aids their standing among many Afghans, particularly when contrasted with the corruption and ineffectiveness of Afghan government. They absolutely do -- at least on limited occasions -- "balance military and political action." But isn't it clear that the bar is much lower on this, seeing as they're not the legitimate government? If the Taliban were so effective at doing this, then why the popular discontent during the period where they were actually in power?

Right now, the Taliban have a "successful insurgency" simply because they haven't lost. They have manipulated circumstances such that it looks even less likely that they will lose in the future, so I suppose that could be considered progress. But when you write that "creating insecurity is easy... but generating a successful insurgency requires more than that," I'm curious what the "more than that" is. I don't think I necessarily agree with you. Creating a successful revolution, or providing a governing alternative, those are things that require more. But generating a successful insurgency only requires the creation of insecurity and momentum... the appearance and reality of some limited success. Then others will jump on board, whether or not they share the political ideology or specific grievance of the insurgency's core.

I'm not going to specifically address questions three and four because I think that the former is somewhat irrelevant (though I apologize if I misrepresented you) and that the latter is covered above. Thanks for the opportunity to explain myself, though, and for making me consider these questions more deeply.

But the Taliban Might Try to Get Pakistan's Nukes! Oh Wait... UPDATED

...they have tried already. Via the Times of India:

Pakistan's nuclear facilities have already been attacked at least thrice by its home-grown extremists and terrorists in little reported incidents over the last two years, even as the world remains divided over the safety and security of the nuclear weapons in the troubled country, according to western analysts.

The incidents, tracked by Shaun Gregory, a professor at Bradford University in UK, include an attack on the nuclear missile storage facility at Sargodha on November 1, 2007, an attack on Pakistan's nuclear airbase at Kamra by a suicide bomber on December 10, 2007, and perhaps most significantly the August 20, 2008 attack when Pakistani Taliban suicide bombers blew up several entry points to one of the armament complexes at the Wah cantonment, considered one of Pakistan's main nuclear weapons assembly.

Well thank goodness the attacks were ineffectual. So it seems that extremists know where Pakistan's nuclear weapons are and have attempted to at least disrupt activities at those locations, if not failed utterly in actually absconding with a device. It is slightly reassuring that the Pakistani Army was able to keep the weapons safe and appear to maintain fairly robust security measures.

Granted, these attacks all occurred prior to the late winter offensives by the Pakistani Taliban, but the reality is the Taliban threat to Pakistan's nuclear arsenal is way overblown. Pakistan sports one of the largest armies in the world that is becoming increasingly modern (thanks to the infusion of U.S. money and training). To suggest that the Taliban will come out of the mountains to defeat the Pakistani Army to obtain nuclear weapons seems absolutely preposterous to me.

I would even argue that such an attempt by the Taliban would be a grave strategic misstep by them. Without Pakistan viewing them as an existential threat (which they are not), the Pakistani government will not attempt to eradicate them. If a substantial effort is made to obtain weapons, that could very well change the government's calculus on who is a greater threat: extremists or India.

I don't believe that the Taliban will mount a serious attempt to obtain a nuclear weapon nor will they ever be a serious threat to the existence of Pakistan. That just leaves us to worry about a coup in which the ownership of the devices is left in question. But don't bet on the Taliban making that happen. There are a whole lot of other groups that want to get their hands on those weapons whose agendas are much more aligned with the ISI's.

H/T to SNLII for passing on the article.

UPDATE: Jari points out that the footnotes from the CTC Sentinel suggest that the sites that had been attacked were not likely nuclear facilities and that the attacks were overstated. I'd say much like the Taliban threat to the security of Pakistan's nuclear weapons.

Uncle Mehsud Wants You!

There is an interesting article in the LA Times today about the Pakistani Taliban kidnapping teenage boys as some sort of recruitment process. It appears that the Taliban has been doing this in Swat for a while to train the boys to be scouts, suicide bombers, and generic fighters, according to both the boys and a Pakistani Army officer. The article discusses the draconian training regime:

The boys were blindfolded and taken to a camp where about 150 other boys were being trained, the 16-year-old said. At his camp, he said, conditions were harsh. Food was scarce, and at times dinner amounted to a piece of flatbread shared among four boys. The recruits had to wake up before sunrise for morning prayers, then run up and down the hillsides. Calisthenics and at times firearms demonstrations followed. In the afternoons, there were indoctrination sessions to convince the youths of the ideal of waging holy war against the military. "We were miserable there," the 16-year-old said. "That's why we escaped."

Transgressions were dealt with harshly. One boy who didn't attend morning prayers had his face painted black. Another boy who used a splinter of tree bark to clean his teeth had his head shoved underwater and held there. He was told he was being punished because he didn't get permission from the tree's owner.

I'm not too sure what to make of this. At first I thought, no kidding - of course they're recruiting boys to do a lot of dirty work. While always cautious of males of any age, a 15 year old kid does not register immediately as a threat to a passing convoy as he is not a military-age male (usually 18-35 or so). It is also easier for them to conceal their true intent by doing what teenage boys usually do in these areas. You can scout against counterinsurgent convoys easily while selling soda and cigarettes, playing football or cricket, or doing menial labor for your family. Obviously the Taliban would love to have a cadre of these guys. This is true also for suicide bombers.

But the methods of recruitment and training seem a little bizarre to meet this model (which I came across in Iraq). First, you don't need to train scouts like this - you just pay the kids and tell them what type of info you want and how to contact you. Second, they make terrible fighters because they are generally too young to be proficient. Spend any time with a teenager and try to get them to do work and you would understand what I mean. Now extrapolate that to hard mountainous insurgency fighting and I would hazard that they become a little more useless (in general - Africa's child soldiers don't fit this mold, but the Taliban isn't forcing narcotics on these kids so I consider it a different case). Thirdly, they said they weren't being trained to be suicide bombers so that wasn't the likely intent of why they were there - and it seems that was kept for the true believers.

So what to make of this? It seems to me then that they were being trained to be fighters as that's the only likely scenario I see based on their comments to the reporter and the Pakistani Army. If I could not be a pessimist for a second, this seems to bode poorly for the Pakistani Taliban. If they need to kidnap teenagers, who will be sub-performing fighters and don't want to do it in the first place, it seems to me that the Taliban might be having problems with recruiting, training, and deploying a large enough force to counter the Pakistani Army.

Ok, optimism is over. For this to matter, the Pakistani Army would need to continue to press against the Taliban and take advantage of this and the reported power vacuum. Too bad that's not likely.

Olivier Roy on the U.S. and Pakistan

Interesting interview in Le Monde of Olivier Roy, one of the finest experts on Islam and Islamism, on the death of Baitullha Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Talibans. Here is my quick and dirty translation of the two key paragraphs :

Q : Can this be considered a victory for the American and Pakistani forces ?

A : Yes, since Baitullah Mehsud symbolized the rise of the Talibans and the unification of different radical forces in the region. It shows in particular the efficiency of the American tactic consisting in using drones that are costless in terms of human lives. For the Americans and the Pakistani Army, it is positive. But it is very unlikely that this will reverse the situation, because it is not just about an individual. There is in this zone a conjunction between the tribal, clan, and ethnic solidarities and the Taliban ideology, and this is why the movement is strong. It also shows that there is cooperation in the field of intelligence : Americans could probably not have localized Mehsud without Pakistani help.

Q : This illustrates, then, that the cooperation between Pakistan and the US is working well ?

A : What it illustrates is the fact that, when Pakistanis want to cooperate, things work out. But I do not think that this signals a fundamental change in the very ambiguous policy of the Pakistani army. Pakistanis play a very complex and ambiguous game, and we have no indication that they are in a phase of full and complete cooperation with the Americans in the struggle against the Talibans. In the present case, Baitullah Mehsud was becoming dangerous for the Pakistanis.

The Pakistani use the Talibans to undermine the authority of the Karzaï regime, but the Pakistani army has no desire to see the Pakistani Talibans look in the direction of Islamabad, as the Talibans from the Swat Valley did a few months ago. The Pakistani army does not want to break the momentum of the Talibans, but it wants them to be not strong enough to threaten the central government. It is in the framework of this subtle and very risky game that the Pakistanis have helped the Americans. No matter how strong they are, the Americans will not get anywhere without the help of the Pakistanis.

One minor conclusion : the French, unlike Australians and East Tennesseans, think drone strikes are cool.

One more important conclusion : To find out whether we have a reasonable chance of success in Afghanistan, the first question to ask is : can we succeed in Afghanistan if we fail in Pakistan ? And if the answer is no, then it all boils down to the following : what leverage exactly do we have on the Pakistani army? Pakistan would not be the first country whose elite (political or military) finds a low-level insurgency to be more beneficial for its vested interests than peace. The U.S. will need to convince the Pakistani army that they share the same interests ; if these interests include preventing the Talibans from laying hands on Islamabad and taking control of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, that’s something. But reducing the Taliban presence in Pakistan to the point that they do not threaten Afghanistan (or Pakistan) anymore ? This will be a harder sell.

Baitullah Mehsud dead?

This morning the news reported that one of Mehsud's wives had been killed in a drone strike. As the day went on, intelligence officials apparently became increasingly confident that the Pakistani Taliban leader had been killed as well. The Times reports:

The C.I.A. missile strike in Pakistan’s tribal areason Wednesday may have killed Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the country’s fearsome Taliban militia, American and Pakistani officials said Thursday.

Officials in Washington and Islamabad were scrambling to make sense of intercepted communications that seemed to indicate that Mr. Mehsud might have been killed in the strike, and by Thursday evening American officials said they were growing increasingly confident that the Taliban leader was dead.

Still, they cautioned that it could be weeks before they could be certain, given the difficulty of getting to the remote location in South Waziristan to perform DNA tests.

Andrew Exum wonders what effect Mehsud's death would have on Pakistan's appetite for continued fighting in Waziristan.

But it's my sense that many in Pakistan consider Mehsud to basically be the root of their problems and that taking him out would be the natural end to a campaign against the militants in FATA and the NWFP. So should we worry that the death of Mehsud might, perversely, mean a relaxation of the Pakistani Army's campaign against Pakistan's insurgent groups? Or will this instead fill them with confidence to carry on?

For one thing, the campaign slowed down dramatically after the Swat offensive. We've been hearing for weeks about how the Pakistani Army is preparing for bloody and protracted fighting in Waziristan, and how they were making final preparations for an offensive. As far as I can tell, that hasn't happened yet. There are a lot of bombs being dropped from F-16s, and that's all well and good, but I'm reasonably sure this long-awaited ground offensive has yet to take place. Does that seem more or less likely now if Mehsud is dead? I know my answer.

Islamabad has already demonstrated its indifference to any ideas we may have about seeking Pakistani help interdicting the flow of fighters and/or materiel westward and northward across the Durand Line. In fact, Pakistani officials have even complained about the coalition's Helmland offensive, suggesting that it does nothing to improve the situation and only causes more problems for them. And now we think that the death of their "ace of spades" is going to motivate them to go in and clean out the whole area, the cost of which effort seems to dramatically outweigh the benefit for them?

This isn't North Korea. Pakistan may not do what we like or expect, but that tends to be a problem with our expectations, not their rationality. How long is it going to take us to absorb the simple lesson that the war in Afghanistan, in the final analysis, probably does Pakistan much more good than harm?