Taliban co-founder Abdul Ghani Baradari
Taliban leader Abdul Ghani Baradar, who was released from a Pakistani prison less than three years ago at the request of the US, has emerged as the undisputed winner of the 20-year war in Afghanistan, The Guardian reported. While Haibatullah Akhundzada is the overall leader of the Taliban, Baradar is its political head and its most public face.
In a televised statement on the fall of Kabul on Sunday, he said the real test of the Taliban had just begun and that they had to serve the nation.
The story of his adult life is the story of the country’s relentless, merciless struggle.
Born in 1968 in Uruzgan province, he fought in the Afghan Mujahideen against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. After the Russians were driven out in 1992 and the country plunged into civil war between rival warlords, Baradar founded a seminary in Kandahar with his former commander and distinguished brother-in-law, Mohammad Omar.
Together they founded the Taliban, a movement led by young Islamic scholars dedicated to the religious purification of the country and the creation of an emirate.
Driven by religious fervor, widespread hatred of warlords, and substantial support from Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, the Taliban rose to power in 1996 after a series of surprise conquests of provincial capitals that took the world by surprise, As has been the case in recent weeks.
The report stated that Mullah Omar’s deputy Baradar, widely regarded as a highly effective strategist, was the principal architect of those victories.
Baradar held military and administrative roles throughout the five-year Taliban regime, and was deputy minister of defense until it was overthrown by the US and its Afghan allies.
During the Taliban’s 20 years in exile, Baradar had a reputation for being a powerful military leader and a subtle political operative. Western diplomats saw him as the wing of the Quetta Shura, the Taliban’s reorganized leadership in exile, most resistant to ISI control, and most amenable to political contacts with Kabul.
However, the administration of former US President Barack Obama was more intimidated by his military expertise than it was hopeful about his perceived liberal leanings. The CIA tracked him down in Karachi in 2010 and persuaded the ISI to arrest him in February that year.
“The capture of Baradar was instigated primarily because of his role in the war and not because of the possibility that he was suddenly going to make peace,” said a former officer.
“The fact that the Pakistanis held them all those years was in large part because the US told them to do so.”
The Guardian reports that in 2018, however, Washington’s attitude changed and former President Donald Trump’s Afghan envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad, asked Pakistanis to release Baradar so he could lead talks in Qatar. , based on the belief that he would settle for a power-sharing arrangement. .
“I had never seen any real proof of that point, but it was just a kind of mythical idea,” the former officer said.
Baradar signed the Doha Agreement with the US in February 2020, which the Trump administration saw as a breakthrough towards peace, but which is now the only platform towards a total victory for the Taliban.
There should have been power-sharing talks between the Taliban and Ashraf Ghani’s Kabul government after the US and Taliban agreed not to fight each other.
Those talks faltered with little progress, the report said, and it is now clear that Baradar and the Taliban were playing for time, waiting for the Americans to leave and preparing for a final offensive.
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