The group’s co-founder was jailed, then freed, by the Pakistanis after American pressure. He will take an important role in the new Afghanistan
MULLAH ABDUL GHANI BARADAR was not among the Taliban men who strode, unopposed, into the presidential palace in Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, on August 15th. But he is credited with getting them there. Having just returned to the country for the first time in over a decade, he is expected to be anointed as the leader of the hastily resurrected Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Who is he?
Born into an influential Pushtun tribe in southern Afghanistan in 1968, in his youth Mullah Baradar fought with mujahideen guerrillas against Soviet troops, and the Afghan government they left behind. After the war he helped Mullah Muhammad Omar, his former commander (and, some say, brother-in-law), found the Taliban (“students”), a posse of hard-line seminarians united to sweep away heathen local warlords, who then swiftly conquered much of the country in 1996.
As a spiritual leader and emir Mullah Omar decreed the strictest interpretation of sharia (Islamic law). Under his rule Mullah Baradar rose to the rank of deputy defence minister. (It is said to have been Mullah Omar who nicknamed him “Baradar”, which means “brother”.) After the American invasion in 2001 Mullah Baradar drove his commander on the back of a motorcycle to hide in the hills. Senior members of the Taliban then ran things from Pakistan, first from the city of Quetta and later from Karachi. Mullah Baradar was an effective leader. A profile in Newsweek described his style as that of an “old-fashioned Pushtun tribal head”—powerful yet consultative. Less extremist than some, Mullah Baradar was still committed to violent jihad (fighting against the enemies of Islam).
In 2010 he was tracked down by America’s CIA and arrested by the Pakistani intelligence services in Karachi. In 2018, at the request of the Americans, Pakistani officials released him from prison to participate in peace negotiations in Doha. Since 2016 he has served under Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada (Mullah Omar died in 2013, though his death was concealed for two years). As a political deputy in 2020 he met Mike Pompeo, then Secretary of State, twice and spoke with President Donald Trump by telephone. It was Mullah Baradar’s signature on an agreement made by America to withdraw its forces—the precursor, it was hoped, to a power-sharing agreement between the Taliban and Afghanistan’s government. (In July this year Mullah Baradar also joined delegations to Moscow and Beijing.)
At talks between Taliban and Afghan leaders in Doha in September 2020, Mullah Baradar claimed to want “a free, independent, united and developed country” with “an Islamic system in which all tribes and ethnicities of the country find themselves without any discrimination and live their lives in love and brotherhood”.
The promise that bloody theocrats could change was what many Afghans, and the West, wanted to hear. In a press conference yesterday the group said that women’s rights would be guaranteed “within the limits of Islam”, and that free media would be protected. But in some recently seized areas, the Taliban have already re-imposed draconian restrictions on women. In Kabul those who worked with the occupiers face intimidation, beatings or worse.
