Captured Leader Offers Insight Into the Taliban

By ERIC SCHMITT
NYT

WASHINGTON — Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the most senior Afghan Taliban leader 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.

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