Another top Taliban leader has been arrested in Pakistan, the latest in a string of blows to the insurgency's top command.
Maulavi Abdul Kabir, a one-time governor of eastern Afghanistan before the overthrow of the Taliban regime, was arrested in northwest Pakistan, Afghan government and Taliban sources confirmed t o The Globe and Mail.
He is believed to have been arrested as recently as Saturday near the home of the insurgency's Peshawar Shura, a council of insurgent advisers second only to the Taliban's ruling Quetta shura. Mr. Kabir was positioned at the top of the Peshawar shura.
"He was governor of Nangrahar, the largest and most important eastern province of the country, and Logar, and was currently leading the insurgency in the whole eastern zone," said Kabul-based analyst Abdulhadi Hairan. "In any case, the arrests are important and will affect the Taliban to an extent."
It comes after the arrest of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taliban's second-in-command and a prominent figure in the Quetta shura, and of a pair of shadow governors. All the arrests took place within the past two months in Pakistan, and have been revealed in the past week.
The arrest of men at the top of each major shura is considered a strong achievement for Pakistani and coalition forces.
"Of course, these arrests are very important for the international community. To say those commanders who ... are threatening the survival of this nation and this state, they [the arrests]are important," said Waliullah Rahmani, executive director of the Kabul Center for Strategic Studies, in an interview with The Globe and Mail.
"For the international community and the Afghan government, Kabir's arrest is an achievement. The question is how productive his interrogation will be."
Taliban shadow governors Mullah Abdul Salam of Kunduz province and Mullah Mohammed of Baghlan province were arrested two weeks ago. Those arrests, along with that of Mullah Baradar, were first reported by the New York Times, which withheld news of Mullah Baradar's arrest for about three days at the request of the Obama administration.
The four arrests signal a new role for Pakistan in the fight against the Taliban, and come as a blow to the insurgency while coalition forces, buoyed by a surge in American troops into the country, are carrying out a series major offensives in Afghanistan's volatile south. There has been some speculation that Mullah Baradar is providing the locations of other Taliban operatives to Pakistani interrogators.
"Now Pakistan wants to show that it is more co-operative. It wants to prove its co-operation by arresting more [people]" Mr. Rahmani said.
Analysts say the arrests show Pakistan is asserting its influence on the region to preserve its sphere of influence over Afghanistan amidst ongoing reconciliation talks between some top Taliban leaders - including Mullah Baradar - and Afghan president Hamid Karzai, with hopes of getting a say in which Taliban members will be allowed back into the Afghan government fold.
"Thus Pakistan gave a strong message to both the U.S. and the Taliban. The U.S. got this message: We have control over these people, we can capture them, we can disrupt both of their important shuras, but you have to trust on us and have to gave us an important role in the reconciliation," Mr. Hairan, an analyst at Kabul's Centre for Conflict and Peace Studies and local journalist, wrote in an e-mail to The Globe. "Once Pakistan gets this central role in the reconciliation process, it will insist on installing its favorite Afghan Taliban in the government."
Mr. Kabir was the second deputy of Afghanistan's council of minister's during the Taliban regime.
"Abdul Kabir is one of the high-ranking Taliban officials," Mr. Rahmani said. "He was someone who was active since the Taliban was established and founded in 1994."
He is suspected to have close ties with Mullah Omar, the spiritual leader of the Taliban, as well as with Al Qaeda. It was rumoured he was engaged in talks with the Afghan government in 2005, but he has since been less receptive to reconciliation than Mullah Baradar was, Mr. Rahmani said. That sets him apart from Mullah Baradar, who was rumoured to have been in reconciliation talks for months, during which he was said to be removed from his post as military commander for the Taliban in the key provinces of Helmand and Kandahar, where Canadian troops are based.
"I don't think it is right to put him along with Baradar in one line," Mr. Rahmani said, adding that the arrest of Mullah Baradar, considered by some to be a moderate, may in fact be bad news for Afghan officials hoping for reconciliation.
"For the Afghan government, which wants some effective peacemakers within the insurgency, I don't think that for example Baradar's arrest has been productive, based on their own thinking," Mr. Rahmani said.
Afghan and American officials, who were involved in Mullah Baradar's arrest, have not confirmed the arrest of Mr. Kabir, and some Taliban spokesmen continue to deny it to local media.