Has Pakistan's Arrest Of A Taliban Leader Threaten Peace Talks?

A man believed to be Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar in a photograph taken in 1998, given to The New York Times by a former photographer for the Taliban

Afghan Officials Say Pakistan's Arrest Of Taliban Leader Threatens Peace Talks -- Washington Post

KABUL -- Senior Afghan officials are now criticizing as counterproductive the arrest in Pakistan this year of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the No. 2 Taliban official. Its main effect, the Afghan officials say, has been to derail Afghan-led efforts to secure peace talks with the Taliban, making that peace ever more remote.

The episode offers a window into the mutual suspicions that still divide Afghanistan and Pakistan, mostly because of Pakistan's long history of support for the Taliban, as well as differences between Afghanistan, Pakistan and the United States about how best to seek reconciliation between insurgents and the Afghan government.

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My Comment: The Afghan Government's defense of this mass murderer appears .... from the outside .... to be a bit strange. It is therefore no surprise that Pakistan has refused to extradite him to Afghanistan fearing (justifiably it seems) that to do so would only result in his release.

I suspect that there are numerous clan and tribal loyalties at play here, and it illustrates accurately the difficulty that U.S. and allied forces have when coming to grip with this insurgency .... friend and foe are quite often the same person.