Notorious jihadi terrorist and head of the political wing of the Taliban Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar alias Mullah Brother arrived in Islamabad from Doha on Wednesday as head of a three-member delegation which is negotiating a crucial peace deal with the current Afghan government.
On the day of his arrival in Islamabad, a bomb went off at Bagham provincial hospital near Pul-e-Charkhi in Kabul, killing at least 13 security personnel. Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack. It seems that both the Taliban and Pakistani military establishment want to maintain nerve-reckoning pressure on the Afghan government during the Afghan-Taliban peace talks that are too obviously being brokered by Pakistan under the instructions of the United States which is desperate to pull out the bulk of its stranded military force from the war torn country.
Mullah Brother is no stranger to Pakistan. He was introduced into the Afghan jihad against the Soviet forces in communist Afghanistan during the 1980s. However, he not only learned the art of warfare but also picked up a few of his Pakistani master’s deceptive talents. Back in 2009 Mullah Brother began secret negotiations with the then president of Afghanistan Hamid Karzai. Perhaps it was a tip off by the Pakistani ISI that led to the CIA raid in Karachi in February 2010 which led to his arrest. However, Pakistan’s then interior minister Malik Rehman categorically denied any involvement of the country’s secret services in the operation that led to Mullah’s arrest.
Once in custody, Mullah Brother’s secret talks with Karzai could not bypass the Pakistani military establishment. He was released in October 2018 allegedly at the request of the Americans who under Donald Trump were planning a pullout from Afghanistan.
Once released Mullah was planted in Doha in Qatar where an office had been established for the Taliban. It is from this office that Mullah continued his ‘diplomatic’ activities that finally led to the first round of peace negotiations between the Taliban and the Afghan government in September 2020 in Doha. But Pakistan no longer trusts Mullah, hence, the self-assigned crucial role of mediation it has taken up.
During his three-day visit to Islamabad, Mullah is expected to meet prime minister Imran Khan. A preliminary meeting between him and Pakistani foreign minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi has already taken place. But more importantly Pakistan is facilitating a wider meeting between leaders of various factions of the Taliban itself. This is even more significant than the Afghan-Taliban peace talks since Pakistani military establishment is eager to bring the Taliban leadership under one umbrella which would be much easier to control. And it is in this regard that Mullah is holding meetings with top level leadership and stakeholders who are involved in the game of jihadi terrorism. Hence, during his meeting with the Pakistani leaders, trust building measures will be finalised.
But more importantly there is the involvement of the Chinese in the getting a peace deal finalised. China has huge interests in Afghanistan. Fraternal relation between China and jihadi terrorists go back to the time of the so-called Afghan jihad. China gave massive military and monetary support to the Afghan mujahedin 1980s. In his book The China-Pakistan Axis, Andrew Small writes “Beijing became the arms-supplier-in-chief for the guerrilla war against the Soviet Union”. And none other than the grandson of Mao Zedong, Kong Jining, was himself who was facilitating liaisons with the ISI during the mujahedin campaign. At the time Kong Jining was the Chinese military attaché at the Chinese embassy in Islamabad.
Other than economic interests China has been keen to strip its Uighurs jihadists of any foreign support. After the collapse of the Soviet Union several jihadi terrorist groups began operating in the newly independent central Asian states. And under Taliban they set up training camps in Afghanistan and in Uzbekistan.
The Islamic jihadist organisations overshadowed the genuine Free East Turkmenistan democratic movement. It send cold shivers down the spine of the totalitarian regime of the Chinese Communist Party to realise that Islamic jihadist terrorism has come to their own backyard. It was in this back drop that in February 1999 a group of five Chinese diplomats flew into Kabul and held meeting with the Taliban. In return for cutting off training assistance to Uighurs China offered opening of formal trade ties. It was at this point that Taliban’s ambassador to Islamabad, Syed Muhammad Haqqani assured his Chinese counterpart that “they would not allow anyone to use Afghan territory against Beijing”.
It is therefore highly probable that during his three day official visit Mullah Brother will also be holding ‘unofficial’ secret meeting with the Chinese officials based at their embassy in Islamabad. After all Pakistan and China are partners in crime when it comes to exporting jihadi terrorism into the region. Hence any peace deal finalised will have to go through a series of sub-negotiations in which the Afghan government seems to have little role other than that of a passive client to say the least.
The peace negotiation have been given a break from December 14 and are scheduled to resume on January 5, 2021. Until then the evil troika of Pakistan and China together with the various leaders of the Taliban will remain busy chalking out the road map for future terms and conditions for a renewed partnership among them.
(Dr Amjad Ayub Mirza is an author and a human rights activist from Mirpur in PoJK. He currently lives in exile in the UK. Views are personal)
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