More Taliban arrest in Pakistan

NY Times:

Two senior Taliban leaders have been arrested in recent days inside Pakistan, officials said Thursday, as American and Pakistani intelligence agents continued to press their offensive against the group’s leadership after the capture of the insurgency’s military commander last month.

Afghan officials said the Taliban’s “shadow governors” for two provinces in northern Afghanistan had been detained in Pakistan by officials there. Mullah Abdul Salam, the Taliban’s leader in Kunduz, was detained in the Pakistani city of Faisalabad, and Mullah Mohammed of Baghlan Province was also captured in an undisclosed Pakistani city, they said.

The arrests come on the heels of the capture of Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taliban’s military commander and the deputy to Mullah Mohammed Omar, the movement’s founder. Mr. Baradar was arrested in a joint operation by the C.I.A. and the ISI, Pakistan’s military intelligence agency.

The arrests were made by Pakistani officials, the Afghans said, but it seemed probable that CIA officers accompanied them, as they did in the arrest of Mr. Baradar. Pakistani officials declined to comment.

Together, the three arrests mark the most significant blow to the Taliban’s leadership since the American-backed war began eight years ago. They also demonstrate the extent to which the Taliban’s senior leaders have been able to use Pakistan as a sanctuary to plan and mount attacks in Afghanistan.

It was not immediately clear if the arrests of the Taliban shadow governors were made possible by intelligence taken from Mr. Baradar. But it seemed likely. In the days after Mr. Baradar’s arrest, American officials said they managed to keep his detention a secret from many Taliban leaders, and that they were determined to roll up as much of the Taliban’s leadership as they could.

...

A senior American commander, speaking on condition of anonymity, said American forces had detained or killed “three or four” Taliban provincial governors in the past several weeks, including the Taliban’s shadow governor for Lagman Province.

Another American official, also speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that Mullah Zakhir, the Taliban’s military commander for southern Afghanistan, had been ordered back to Pakistan at the around the time of the Marja offensive.

Indeed, the capture of two Taliban governors inside Pakistan may reflect the greater level of insecurity that all Taliban leaders are feeling inside Afghanistan at the moment.

...

The decapitation by detention of the Taliban leadership should be making all Taliban leaders nervous. They have lost their sanctuary and they are being hunted relentlessly in Afghanistan where the special forces have killed over 50 leaders in the last few weeks before the Marjah offensive.

The Taliban resistance to that offensive looks incoherent and disorganized. It is mostly ad hoc.

The combination of the special ops attacks and the arrest in Pakistan along with the Hellfire strikes in Pakistan give the Taliban leaders little room to wiggle at this point.

The AP is now reporting that nine tied to al Qaeda were arrested overnight in Karachi. It has suddenly become a dangerous place to be a terrorist. "One was identified as Ameer Muawiya, who the officials said was in charge of foreign al-Qaida militants operating in Pakistan's tribal regions near Afghanistan and was an associate of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden." Apparently intercepts of their communications by the NSA was a key to finding them. That suggest to me. that the seizure of the al Qaeda Rolodex on its way to Yemen may have given us some help.