Word: mullahs
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There was good news from other fronts too. In Pakistan, a joint operation in Karachi by the CIA and Pakistan's own spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), had netted a very big fish: Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Afghan Taliban's military chief. In quick succession, the ISI had also rolled up two of the Taliban's "shadow" governors of Afghanistan's provinces and another senior figure. And in North Waziristan, near Pakistan's border with Afghanistan, a missile launched from a CIA drone had struck at the heart of the Haqqani network, an al-Qaeda-affiliated group responsible...
Even so, Pakistani cooperation in the arrest of Baradar, on the eve of the Marjah assault, was an unexpected bonus for McChrystal. Why did Pakistan roll up Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar's deputy? Islamabad has previously arrested senior figures in the Afghan Taliban, but they've typically been released quickly, without U.S. officials being given access to them. But the Pakistanis made an exception with Baradar, who may have a treasure trove of information on the Taliban. Possibly the Pakistanis were under pressure to reciprocate for the U.S. strikes on the Mehsuds. Or perhaps Baradar had fallen out with...
...Pakistani forces, military relations between Islamabad and Washington have appeared to be on an upswing. Not too long ago, U.S. insistence that Pakistan step up its cooperation in the fight against the Afghan Taliban had riled the military bigwigs in the south Asian nation - Pakistan's military helped create Mullah Omar and his Taliban fighters in Afghanistan in the mid-1990s and have surreptitiously supported them, for the most part, ever since. The ties have remained testy. When army chief Ashfaq Kayani, the most powerful man in Pakistan, was in Washington a few months ago, General David Petraeus, head...
...arrest of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, Mullah Mohammad Omar's vaunted No. 2, seems to have reversed the momentum. Talking to TIME inside the 2,000-year-old Bala Hissar fortress jutting above Peshawar's old bazaar, Tariq Khan, frontier corps commander major general, admitted that "at first, that commitment with the Americans wasn't there." Now, however, Khan says the U.S. and Pakistani forces along the border are sharing intelligence "in real time, as it's happening." (See why Pakistanis believe there is a U.S. conspiracy against them...
...have been the favor Islamabad was repaying with the capture of Baradar and three Afghan Taliban "shadow" governors who were operating out of Pakistan. Mehsud had masterminded a suicide-bombing campaign that hit schools, police stations, bazaars and garrisons across the country, killing hundreds. (On Tuesday, another Taliban leader, Mullah Abdul Qadir, ex-governor of Afghanistan's Nangahar province, was reportedly arrested, though neither Pakistan nor the Taliban spokesman would confirm the capture.) (See pictures of the October 2009 attack on a Pakistani university...