After the Matches, After the Drones, How to Capture An Elusive Taliban Leader

For more than a decade, both the U.S. and the Pakistans have tried a rising scale of payments -- from a few hundred dollars up to $25 million -- to capture the most violent militants using the borderlands with Afghanistan as safe harbor. On one of my reporting trips to Pakistan in 1998, American aircraft dropped green matchbooks offering $5 million for the capture of Osama bin Ladin. I keep a box of the matches as a souvenir in a drawer.

Needless to say, neither this system, nor the use of arms, has resulted in many top-rank captures. Those that have occurred – such as that of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shibh – were the result of other traditional intelligence.

Why would dirt-poor people living in the tribal belt give up a chance at millions of dollars for turning in an Uzbek or a Saudi with whom they have absolutely no blood link, with whom their sole link is that they happened to drop in on the village one day?

One reason is the code – the Pashtunwali, under which the tribals don’t make a habit of surrendering guests. The other reason is that the Americans went about it all wrong culturally. What they needed to do was to quietly seek intelligence, without tipping their hand publicly; then lots of Pakistanis, including tribals, might have helped find virtually any of the militants, including bin Ladin.

But after the matches, it was more or less a matter of pride to keep one’s mouth shut. But that’s all another, long story.

What’s now news is a new tactic to make it in the tribal interest to talk. The tactic is arresting other members of the tribe. In the case of Baitullah Mehsud, the Taliban commander accused of murdering former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in 2007 and various other continuing acts of mayhem, the Pakistanis are arresting other Mehsuds.

Given that the Mehsuds are an enormous tribe -- according to a seriously good story by The Washington Post’s Joshua Partlow and Haq Nawaz Khan, there are a few hundred thousand of them in and around the Pakistani border region of South Waziristan – there are a lot to choose from. Partlow and Khan report that hundreds of Mehsud-owned businesses may have been shut down, and 25 members of the tribe arrested.

This is getting some bad press. Over at Registan.net, Josh Foust for one is up in arms.

But this seems to me to be among the shrewdest tactics the Pakistanis have employed so far. As my old friend Jim Rupert of Bloomberg reports from the field, drone attacks may have done more to aggravate the region than make its occupants give up Behsud.

Yet those who have actually traveled in the tribal areas know that this is a tough region. It freely engages in smuggling, kidnapping, opium- and gun-running, and so on. I recall inspecting the enormous estate of Haji Ayub Afridi, one of the border region’s most legendary drug smugglers, along the Khyber Pass. Afridi would understand the language the Pakistanis are speaking with such roundups.

This is carrot and stick. The stick is arrest. The carrot is that, if you want to avoid jail and your business shutting down for awhile, the U.S. is offering up $5 million.