Aide: Karzai 'very angry' at Taliban boss' arrest

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Aide: Karzai 'very angry' at Taliban boss' arrest

By DEB RIECHMANN and KATHY GANNON, Associated Press Writers Deb Riechmann And Kathy Gannon, Associated Press Writers 2 hrs 3 mins ago

KABUL – The Afghan government was holding secret talks with the Taliban's No. 2 when he was captured in Pakistan, and the arrest infuriated President Hamid Karzai, according to one of Karzai's advisers.
The detention of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar — second in the Taliban only to one-eyed Mullah Mohammed Omar — has raised new questions about whether the U.S. is willing to back peace discussions with leaders who harbored the terrorists behind the Sept. 11 attacks.

Karzai "was very angry" when he heard that the Pakistanis had picked up Baradar with an assist from U.S. intelligence, the adviser said. Besides the ongoing talks, he said Baradar had "given a green light" to participating in a three-day peace jirga that Karzai is hosting next month.

The adviser, who had knowledge of the peace talks, spoke on condition of anonymity because of their sensitivity. Other Afghan officials, including Abdul Ali Shamsi, security adviser to the governor of Helmand province, also confirmed talks between Baradar and the Afghan government. Several media reports have suggested that Baradar had been in touch with Karzai representatives, but these are the first details to emerge from the discussions.

Talking with the Taliban is gaining traction in Afghanistan as thousands of U.S. and NATO reinforcements are streaming in to reverse the insurgents' momentum. Reconciliation was one topic Karzai and President Barack Obama discussed during a more than one-hour video conference Monday night, Karzai's office said.

Baradar's arrest has already prompted Pakistan and others to stake out their positions on possible reconciliation negotiations that could mean an endgame to the eight-year war.

Officials have disclosed little about how Baradar was nabbed last month in the port city of Karachi. The Pakistanis were said to be upset that the Americans were the source of news reports about his arrest.

The capture was part of a U.S.-backed crackdown in which the Pakistanis also arrested several other Afghan Taliban figures along the porous border between the two countries, after years of being accused by Washington of doing little to stop them.

Far from expressing gratitude, members of Karzai's administration were quick to accuse Pakistan of picking up Baradar either to sabotage or gain control of talks with the Taliban leaders.

Whatever the reason, the delicate dance among Karzai, his neighbors and international partners put the debate over reconciliation on fast forward.
Top United Nations and British officials emphasized last week that the time to talk to the Taliban is now. The Afghan government, for its part, has plans to offer economic incentives to coax low- and midlevel fighters off the battlefield. Another driving force is Obama's goal of starting to withdraw U.S. troops in July 2011.

The United States, with nearly 950 lives lost and billions of dollars spent in the war, is moving with caution on reconciliation.

At a breakfast meeting in Islamabad last week, Karzai said he and his Western allies were at odds over who should be at the negotiating table.

Karzai said the United States was expressing reservations about talks with the top echelon of the Taliban while the British were "pushing for an acceleration" in the negotiation process.

"Our allies are not always talking the same language," he said.

Karzai said overtures to the Taliban stood little chance of success without the support of the United States and its international partners. He says his previous attempts to negotiate with insurgents were not fruitful because "sections of the international community undermined — not backed — our efforts."

The U.S. has said generally that it supports efforts to welcome back any militants who renounce violence, cut ties with al-Qaida and recognize and respect the Afghan constitution, but it is keeping details of its position closely held.

Daniel Markey with the Council on Foreign Relations said that while Karzai is having discussions with senior people on the Taliban side, "it's not clear that Washington or other members of the international community have weighed in as to what they believe are the red lines or proper boundaries with respect to negotiations with the Taliban."


During his trip to Afghanistan last week, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said it was premature to expect senior members of the Taliban to reconcile with the government. He said until the insurgents believe they can't win the war, they won't come to the table. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has said she's highly skeptical that Taliban leaders will be willing to renounce violence.

A U.S. military official in Kabul, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss reconciliation, said the top commander in Afghanistan, U.S. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, has not yet solidified his opinion on this issue.

He said the U.S. is still debating the timing of the Afghan government's outreach to senior leaders of three main Afghan insurgent groups — Omar; Jalaluddin Haqqani, who runs an al-Qaida-linked organization; and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the boss of the powerful Hezb-e-Islami.

The official added that the international military coalition had no problem with the Afghan government's reaching out to anyone, at any time, but is concerned that a deal to end the violence not come at too high a price.

Deep differences remain within the Obama administration on reconciliation, said Lisa Curtis, a research fellow on South Asia for the Heritage

Foundation, a right-leaning think tank in Washington. "This disagreement is contributing to a lack of clarity in U.S. official statements on the issue and leading to confusion among our allies," she said.

"The military surge should be given time to bear fruit," Curtis argued.

"Insurgents are more likely to negotiate if they fear defeat on the battlefield."

Karzai won't discuss his administration's talks with Taliban members or their representatives, but several Afghan officials confirmed that his government was in discussions with Baradar, who hails from Karzai's Popalzai tribe of the Durrani Pashtuns in Kandahar.

"The government has been negotiating with Mullah Baradar, who took an offer to the Taliban shura," Shamsi said, using the word for the group's governing board.

Shamsi said he'd seen intelligence reports indicating that Omar resisted the offer and that Baradar's rivals within the Taliban leadership were fiercely opposed to any negotiations with the Afghan government.

An intelligence official in southern Afghanistan, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk with journalists, said there were reports that Omar was angry about Baradar's negotiations with the government and asked Pakistani intelligence officials to arrest him.

Nevertheless, Hakim Mujahed, a former Taliban ambassador to the United Nations, said many Taliban leaders are willing to talk.

"The problem is not from the Taliban side," he said. "There is no interest of negotiations from the side of the foreign forces."

Hamid Gul, a former director of the Pakistani intelligence service who has criticized the U.S. role in Afghanistan, said the insurgents want three things from the U.S. before talks could begin — a clearer timetable on the withdrawal of troops, to stop labeling them terrorists, and the release of all Taliban militants imprisoned in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

What actually precipitated Baradar's arrest remains a mystery.

Some analysts claim Pakistan wanted to interrupt Karzai's reconciliation efforts or force Karzai to give Islamabad a seat at a future negotiating table.

"I see no evidence to support that theory," Richard Holbrooke, U.S. envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan, told reporters this month. "I know somewhat more than I'm at liberty to disclose about the circumstances under which these events took place and every detail tends to work against that thesis."

Another theory is that Baradar, deemed more pragmatic than other top Taliban leaders, was detained to split him from fellow insurgents.

McChrystal said recently that it was plausible that Baradar's arrest followed an internal feud and purge among Taliban leaders.

There's also speculation that Baradar's arrest was just lucky — even unintentional.
If Karzai was still angry about Baradar's arrest, he didn't show it publicly last week on a two-day visit to Islamabad. His message was twofold — that Pakistan had a significant role to play in reconciliation and that its cooperation would be welcomed. He called Pakistan a "twin" and said Afghans know that without cooperation, neither would find peace.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100316/...ing_to_taliban

So is Karzai angry or are some of his people trying to interfere with what he wants to do?

Joy

[darrels joy]

How Pakistani Help Gets in Karzai's Way

By Tim McGirk / Kabul


Pakistan's arrest of a dozen top Taliban leaders — military commanders, strategic planners and a financier — over the past six weeks is viewed by Afghan and NATO officials with a mixture of relief and suspicion. On one hand, the arrests have disrupted the insurgents' chain of command, making it tougher for the Taliban's war council to relay funds and battle plans to their commanders fighting NATO troops. But according to Afghan officials and diplomats in Kabul, the roll-up of Taliban leaders has dealt a blow to secret, preliminary talks under way during the past six months between President Hamid Karzai and the Taliban, as well as those conducted through a separate channel between the Taliban and U.N. envoys.

Sources consulted by TIME in Peshawar, Kabul and Kandahar all characterize those Taliban commanders picked up by Pakistani intelligence agencies as being more malleable to peace talks with Karzai than a core of hard-liners within the Taliban's ruling shura, or council, who are thought to be hiding in the Pakistani cities of Quetta or Karachi. One foreign diplomat in Kabul says he looked at the list of 14 Taliban arrested by the Pakistanis and thought, "I knew eight of them personally, and they were all in favor of a peace process." This was confirmed by Kai Eide, the U.N.'s former Special Representative in Afghanistan, who told the BBC on March 18 that Pakistan's arrests had cut short "talks about talks" between the U.N. and the Taliban in Dubai. (See "A Civil War Among Afghanistan's Insurgents?")

In a separate channel, President Karzai tapped his ancient clan connections to send out feelers to Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, until recently the Taliban's top military commander, and other Taliban officials who belonged to the President's Popalzai tribe. This led to one or possibly several secret meetings between the Taliban and Karzai's representatives in Saudi Arabia, brokered by that country's King Abdullah. Baradar was captured in Karachi last month in a joint operation by Pakistani and U.S. intelligence agents, in the first of a string of high-profile arrests. In Kabul, a senior Cabinet official complained to TIME, "The Pakistanis knew every movement that these commanders made inside Pakistan over the last eight years. So why did they arrest them now, when we were starting to get somewhere with the Taliban?" (See "Was the Taliban's Captured No. 2 on the Outs with Mullah Omar?")

First off, the Obama Administration is upping pressure on Pakistan to crack down on the Taliban, who for the past eight years have been using Pakistani soil, without risk of capture, for R&R, for plotting their battlefield strategies and for gathering funds and fresh jihadi recruits, especially suicidal teenage bombers from Pakistani madrasahs, Islamic religious schools. But Afghan officials, diplomats and former Taliban ascribe more circuitous motives to the Pakistanis. They say that Pakistan's military and intelligence services were peeved that in both the Dubai and the Saudi talks, senior Taliban went ahead to meet with Karzai's representative and U.N. envoys without first getting clearance from the Pakistanis, who had been the Taliban's main backers since they surfaced in the mid-1990s.

Basically, says a diplomat, "the Pakistanis are arresting those Taliban they can't control." A former Taliban Cabinet minister and ambassador, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, who served time in Guantánamo, concurs, "Pakistan is making these Taliban vanish so that they can't talk."

Kabul has officially asked for the extradition of the arrested Taliban commanders, but according to Pakistani press reports, Islamabad is refusing. Islamabad also rebuffed U.S. requests to interrogate the captured Taliban without the presence of Pakistani intelligence officers.

The upshot, says Thomas Ruttig, a director of Afghanistan Analysts Network, an international think tank in Kabul, is that Pakistan has skillfully put the breaks on the peace process, just as an international consensus, led by the Europeans, is building toward ending NATO'S nine-year conflict with the Taliban through negotiation. "Pakistan would rather there be no talks than talks without their control," says Ruttig.

To build momentum for peace, Karzai in April will hold a jirga, or tribal council, of more than 1,800 parliamentarians, clerics, judges and provincial officials. Farooq Wardak, the Education Minister and organizer of the jirga, tells TIME, "As a nation, we have to agree on the parameters for peace with the Taliban." He says that the "red lines" the Karzai government will refuse to cross in talks with their Taliban adversaries are altering the constitution and withdrawing NATO troops. He adds that many liberal Afghans want safeguards that a future deal with the Taliban won't abolish women's hard-won freedoms in schooling. Many Afghans, he says, also have bitter memories of killings carried out against non-Pashtun communities during the harsh Taliban regime.

So, what does Pakistan want? A senior Afghan diplomat says that when Karzai flew to Islamabad on March 11, he was told by Pakistan's army chief, Ashraf Parvez Kiyani, that Pakistan will nudge the Taliban into future peace talks with Karzai only when the Afghan President starts curtailing the growing influence of India, Pakistan's regional rival, in Afghanistan.

Also, according to these sources, Pakistan wants to see a greater Pashtun representation in Kabul, not only Taliban but also two other insurgent groups, the Haqqani network, which operates in eastern Afghanistan, and former warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's group. Both Haqqani and Hekmatyar have long-standing ties with Pakistani's intelligence services.

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