Baradar arrest: did ISI double-cross Americans?

There was something suspicious about the official triumphalism behind the announcement of the capture of the "Taliban's No 2", Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, in Karachi earlier this week in a "joint CIA and Pakistan intelligence operation". Now suspicions are growing across the region that this may have been one of the biggest double-crosses at a high level in the long and tangled wars afflicting Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The first details of the arrest said the Mullah had been pulled in by agents of Pakistan's Inter Service Intelligence (ISI) as he attended a madrassa on the outskirts of Karachi. According to one supposedly eyewitness account, "CIA agents watched from a car across the road".

Latest well-informed analysis suggests that if those CIA agents were watching, they would have been fuming.

Abdul Ghani Baradar is credited with being the Taliban's strategic brain behind their operations across Afghanistan. He has been putting together the campaigns of individual local faction leaders into something like a regional plan, matching strikes in Jalalabad and Khost with the more intensive operations in Kandahar and Helmand.

At the same time he is credited with being the most senior, and most sane, of the Taliban leadership in favour of cutting a deal with the Karzai regime in Kabul and its American backers. In the past he has spoken to President Karzai's powerful half-brother, Ahmed Walid, strongman of Kandahar. He is also known to have been talking with the Americans, largely through go-betweens and proxies.

Why would the CIA want to remove from the board the only senior Taliban leader described as being "intent or willing for peace negotiation"? If he was really needed for negotiation he should have been allowed to stay free, particularly as he is known to be close to the shadowy spiritual founder and chief of the Taliban of the south and west, Mullah Mohammad Omar.

So, the incident puts the spotlight again on the ISI. Far from achieving a new rapprochement with the US and the CIA, there is a fear that they are still pursuing their own strategy, which for their hardliners would be for the Taliban, whom they helped create, and against the West and its creature Hamid Karzai.

According to those hardliners, the Kabul regime is still tainted as being pro-Northern Alliance, with its make-up of Tajiks, Uzbeks, some Hazara and Pashtuns predominantly from the north of Afghanistan. The ISI disliked the Northern Alliance because for years they saw it as the client of an unlikely trio of patrons, Russia, Iran and India.

The regime in Kabul is also mistrusted by many of the 30 million Pashtun of southern Afghanistan and northern Pakistan. Consequently there has been a weak 'buy-in' by southern Pashtuns into the patronage of the Kabul government, and the southern Pashtuns are under-represented, for example, in the Afghan National Army.

The main aim of Operation Moshtarak is to win the confidence of the southern Pashtun people and to get them to accept the governance, security, redevelopment opportunities and investment on offer from the Kabul regime (with the US arm firmly up its back, like a glove puppet).

Putting it bluntly, the suspicion now is that the ISI has decided to do its own thing by taking into its own hands one of the few senior Taliban capable of cutting a deal with Kabul and the Americans.

Mullah Abdul Salam Zaaef, former Taliban ambassador in Pakistan, former Guantanamo detainee, and adviser on reconciliation to President Karzai, told the New York Times this week that Mullah Baradar's arrest could be disastrous. "If it is really true, it could seriously affect negotiations, and gravely affect the peace process," he said in Kabul. And that may be just what the old hardliners of the ISI want.