Another one gone

Eric Schmitt has an article in The New York Times about another Taliban leader in custody:

Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the most senior Afghan Taliban leader now in custody in Pakistan, is providing important information to American officials on the inner workings of the Taliban, pivotal insights as the United States looks ahead to negotiations to end the war in Afghanistan, according to senior American intelligence and military officials.
Mullah Baradar, the second-ranking Taliban leader, was arrested in January outside Karachi, Pakistan, in an operation by American and Pakistani intelligence agents. His Pakistani captors initially limited American interrogators’ access to him, but American officials say they have had regular, direct contact with Mullah Baradar for several weeks.
For now, officials say, Mullah Baradar is not revealing details of Taliban combat operations, yielding little that American commanders would like to know as they prepare for a military operation around Kandahar, the Taliban’s spiritual base and Afghanistan’s second largest city.
But the officials said he had provided American interrogators with a much more nuanced understanding of the strategy that the Taliban’s supreme leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, is developing for negotiations with the government of President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, who is visiting Washington next week.
Mullah Baradar is describing in detail how members of the Afghan Taliban’s leadership council, or shura, based in Pakistan, interact, and how senior members fit into the organization’s broader leadership, officials said. He is also offering a more detailed understanding of what prompted Mullah Omar to issue a new code of conduct for militants last year that directed fighters to avoid civilian casualties. American officials say the code was meant to project a softer image to the Afghan people. “He’s provided very useful but not decisive information,” an American counterterrorism official said on Wednesday.
Four American military, intelligence, and diplomatic officials provided details of Mullah Baradar’s cooperation, but requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the delicate intelligence interrogations.
Mullah Baradar, in his early 40s and said by most officials to belong to the same Popalzai tribe as Mr. Karzai, is believed to be one of a handful of Taliban leaders who were in periodic contact with Mullah Omar, the reclusive founder of the Taliban. Mullah Baradar’s capture was followed by arrests of two Taliban “shadow governors” in Pakistan. While the arrests showed a degree of cooperation between the Central Intelligence Agency and Pakistan’s main spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, they also illustrated how the Afghan Taliban leadership has relied on Pakistan as a rear base.
Many questions remain about Mullah Baradar’s capture and Pakistan’s motivations. It appears, for instance, that Pakistani authorities did not realize at first their captive’s significance. But they have tried to turn his arrest to their advantage and are poised to use him as a chip in bargaining between the Afghan government and the Taliban and, conceivably, even as a negotiator.
“The key issue is, we should decide jointly how we are going to benefit from his presence,” a senior Pakistani intelligence official in Islamabad said recently. “When we agree on how we can use him for peace talks in Afghanistan then we would not hesitate a second, but there has to be some negotiations.”
Conspiracy theories abound as to who may have tipped off American and Pakistani spies about Mullah Baradar’s location at a house outside Karachi. One theory is that he ran afoul of more hard-line elements in the Taliban. Another is that the Pakistani military seized him because he was freelancing negotiations with Afghan interlocutors, a theory senior Pakistani military and intelligence officials reject.
Initially, some American military officials said that taking Mullah Baradar off the battlefield, and exploiting information he might provide, could deal a blow to Taliban military capacity. But Mullah Omar has replaced Mullah Baradar, his top deputy, with Mullah Abdul Qayyum Zakir, a former detainee at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, who is believed to be in his mid-30s and has a reputation as a tough fighter with few political skills.
“In general, operations in the south, except perhaps for the more spectacular ones, don’t need much outside directions,” said Marvin Weinbaum, a former South Asia intelligence analyst for the State Department.
Senior Taliban officials have sought to discount the impact of Mullah Baradar’s detention on their bargaining position. “The Taliban would be ready to negotiate, but under our own conditions,” a member of the Afghan Taliban’s supreme command said in an interview. “To assume that they would hold the Taliban leadership hostage because of Mullah Baradar’s arrest is not something that would cross our mind.”