Afghanistan at the Crossroads

The capture of the Taliban’s second in command in Karachi has been treated in the media as a major U.S. coup and a watershed event in U.S.-Pakistani cooperation in the war against the Taliban. It is, regrettably, nothing of the kind. Even if Mullah Baradar is indeed the Taliban’s de facto military commander, the operational significance of whatever non-Mirandized information can be extracted from him is likely to be limited. For the fact of the matter is that the Taliban are a highly decentralized organization with very limited effective, let alone instantaneous, communications between its far-flung units in the field and its central “command.” It is not at all clear that somebody hiding out in a dingy apartment in Karachi is fully aware of what’s going on on the ground in Afghanistan.