Was it a 'lucky accident'; NYT tries to take away Pak credit

NEW YORK - A dispatch in Fridays New York Times seeks to take away the credit from Pakistan for the capture of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Afghan Talibans top military commander, saying new details indicate it was merely a lucky accident.
Citing unnamed US officials, the newspaper said American intelligence agencies had intercepted communications saying militants with a possible link to Baradar were meeting. Tipped off by the Americans, it said, Pakistani counter-terrorist officers took several men into custody, meeting no resistance.
Only after a careful process of identification did Pakistani and American officials realize they had captured Mullah Baradar himself, the man who had long overseen the Taliban insurgency against American, NATO and Afghan troops in Afghanistan, The Times said in the Washington-datelined dispatch.
New details of the raid indicate that the arrest of the No. 2 Taliban leader was not necessarily the result of a new determination by Pakistan to go after the Taliban, or a bid to improve its strategic position in the region. Rather, the newspaper quoted one American official as saying that it was a lucky accident.
No one knew what they were getting, he said. Now the full impact of Mullah Baradars arrest will play out only in the weeks to come, the dispatch said. Relations between the intelligence services of the United States and Pakistan have long been marred by suspicions that Pakistan has sheltered the Afghan Taliban, it said. The Pakistanis have long denied it.
The capture of Mullah Baradar was followed by the arrests of two Taliban 'shadow governors elsewhere in Pakistan. While the arrests showed a degree of Pakistani cooperation, they also demonstrated how the Taliban leadership has depended on Pakistan as a rear base.
Jostling over the prize began as soon as Mullah Baradar was identified, according to the dispatch. Officials with the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), limited American access to Mullah Baradar, not permitting direct questioning by Central Intelligence Agency officers until about two weeks after the raid, according to American officials.
The Pakistanis are an independent partner, and sometimes they show it, said one American official briefed on the matter. We dont always love what they do, but if it werent for them, Mullah Baradar and a lot of other terrorists would still be walking around killing people.
Bruce Riedel, an expert on Afghanistan at the Brookings Institution, who advised the Obama administration on Afghan policy early last year, said the tensions surrounding Mullah Baradar were inevitable.
The Pakistanis have a delicate problem with Baradar, Riedel was quoted as saying. If I were in their shoes, Id be worried that he might reveal something embarrassing about relations between the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistani govt or Inter-Services Intelligence.
A Pakistani official expressed impatience with questions about past conflicts over the Afghan Taliban, saying, Its high time now that we move beyond that.
Mullah Baradar is talking a little, though he is viewed as a formidable, hard-line opponent whose interrogation will be a long-term effort, according to American and Pakistani officials cited by the newspaper.
Despite the tensions, interviews with Pakistani military and intelligence officials suggested that the Taliban leaders capture could alter Pakistans calculus about the volatile region, The Times said.
Taking him off the battlefield, and exploiting the information he might provide, could deal a blow to the Talibans military capacity. In the long run, in any discussions of the future governance of Afghanistan, Mullah Baradar could become a bargaining chip and, conceivably, a negotiator.
In interviews with The Times on Thursday, Pakistani officials said an aggressive strategy to weaken the Talibans leadership might cripple the movement enough to bring it to the negotiating table.
Maybe Mullah Baradars capture gives us a breakthrough in terms of reconciliation, one Pakistani intelligence official in Islamabad, was quoted as saying. But the official said such a strategy ran the risk of making the Taliban more hostile or possibly of giving a Taliban hard-liner too much influence in negotiations.
Riedel, of the Brookings Institution, said the tensions surrounding Mullah Baradar were minor compared with the value of having captured him. He said Pakistans cooperation could be a sign that official attitudes there, which have favoured the Afghan Taliban while condemning the Pakistani Taliban, are changing.
I believe the Pakistanis have finally concluded that the Afghan Taliban and Pakistan Taliban were cooperating against them in Waziristan and elsewhere, Riedel said, referring to links among various militant groups in Pakistans tribal areas.
An unnamed Obama administration official was cited as sounding more cautious. All this is not necessarily related to a rational decision at the top of the Pakistani military to see things our way, the official said. I dont see any big shift yet.