FROM GITMO TO THE TALIBAN
February 19, 2010
In today’s Political Diary
A Newsweek profile of Taliban kingpin Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar last summer called him “America’s New Nightmare.” Maybe he’ll turn into our new intelligence gold mine. His capture this month in Pakistan is easily the most important event of its kind since 9/11 mastermind Khaled Sheikh Mohammed was arrested in March 2003.
Though often described as Mullah Omar’s lieutenant, Baradar had operational command of the Taliban’s military activities, its lucrative drug trade and its shadow governments on both sides of the Pakistan border. On Thursday came news that two of Mullah Baradar’s own lieutenants have also been arrested by the Pakistanis. That leaves 36-year-old Afghan Abdullah Gulam Rasoul, otherwise known as “Mullah Zakir,” as his likely successor.
Rasoul is a man the U.S. knows well: He spent years in detention at Guantanamo before he was transferred to a prison in Afghanistan in 2007. Afghan authorities later released him for reasons that never were satisfactorily explained.
As an enemy combatant held at Gitmo, Rasoul was entitled to annual administrative review board hearings. There, he presented himself as a harmless bystander in the war, a Muslim who rejected jihad, liked America and appreciated its work in rebuilding Afghanistan. The U.S. knew better — Rasoul had been captured while riding in a car with a Taliban commander and was carrying two Casio watches of the kind commonly used as timers in IEDs. But amid the Bush Administration’s second-term imperative to clear out as many Gitmo residents as possible, Rasoul was returned to Afghanistan on orders from then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England.
The rest is history — Rasoul is now a prime terrorist orchestrator and you can bet the legion of pro bono lawyers, human-rights activists and sundry other anti-Gitmo agitators who aided his release won’t be volunteering to fight him in Afghanistan.
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