Pakistan captures another top Afghan Taliban leader, Mullah Abdul Kabir

“This indicates Baradar was not a one off or an accident but a turning point in Pakistan’s policy toward the Taliban,” said Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow of Brookings Institution and a former CIA official. “We still need to see how far it goes, but for [Barack] Obama and NATO this is the best possible news. If the safe haven is closing then the Taliban are in trouble.”

Some commentators are sounding a more pessimistic tone, however. The Boston Globe, in an editorial about the recent capture of Mr. Baradar, warns that "there is another, less encouraging explanation of why Pakistan’s shadowy Inter-Services Intelligence Agency suddenly decided to seize the Taliban’s number-two leader, after hosting him for years while he directed the Taliban movement officially headed by Mullah Omar."

Pakistani leaders know that Afghan President Hamid Karzai has been seeking reconciliation talks with the Taliban and that Baradar approved contacts between Taliban leaders and Karzai’s brother. An agreement between the Taliban and the Karzai government could deprive Pakistan of influence in next-door Afghanistan. That prospect disturbs Pakistani leaders, who have long tried to maximize their power in Afghanistan to keep it from linking up with Pakistan’s rival, India.

And in a commentary for National Review Online, Alex Alexiev doubts that Mr. Kabir's capture will have much practical effect in the war in Afghanistan. "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," he writes.

And The Globe and Mail reports that some analysts worry that the spate of recent arrests might undermine Kabul's peace overtures to the Taliban by leaving the Taliban more firmly in the hands of radicals.

[Waliullah Rahmani, executive director of the Kabul Center for Strategic Studies, said] “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. … It shows that many [Taliban-friendly] elements within the Pakistani government and Quetta shura never wanted Baradar to decide the destiny of insurgents in Afghanistan.”

Some experts now warn the arrests of Mullah Baradar and Maulavi Kabir push the Taliban further from reconciliation with the Afghan government.

“The lesson to all of this – the bumper sticker – is that this has really left the hard core in control of the Taliban. And that has all kinds of implications with reconciliation,” said Thomas Johnson, director of the program for culture and conflict studies at California's Naval Postgraduate School.

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