America’s top spy, C.I.A. director William Burns, traveled to Afghanistan and held a secret meeting on Monday with the de facto leader of the Taliban, Abdul Ghani Baradar.
The face-to-face sit down is the highest-level meeting between a member of the Biden Administration and a Taliban leader since the fall of Kabul. It took place as the United States is approaching an August 31st deadline to evacuate Americans, Western allies, and Afghans who assisted with the war effort from the country. Yet, according to The New York Times, former U.S. officials believe more time may be needed to accomplish what President Biden called “one of the largest, most difficult airlifts in history.”
A Taliban spokesman warned that the U.S. would be crossing a “red line” if the thousands of troops redeployed to Afghanistan to aid the evacuation efforts stayed past the end of the month. The spokesman threatened unspecified “consequences.”
In other words, a confrontation between the U.S. and Afghanistan might be brewing unless the two sides can reach some sort of understanding on a new evacuation timeline.
The C.I.A. declined to comment on Burns’ meeting with Baradar, but he has the reputation for dealing with sensitive national security matters. More from The Times:
Before being named as C.I.A. director, Mr. Burns had a long diplomatic career in which he specialized in delicate, secret communications. He titled his memoir “The Back Channel” and was responsible for the initial undisclosed discussions that ultimately lead to the Iran nuclear talks in the Obama administration.
And with the fall of the American-back government and the withdrawal of diplomats and troops from Afghanistan, the C.I.A. will bear much of the responsibility for monitoring Afghanistan going forward.
Baradar, meanwhile, has a long, militaristic history in the region. He fought with the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviets in the 1980s and he held several high-ranking government roles during the Taliban’s repressive reign in the late 1990s. He’s long been viewed as keen military strategist and was a close confidant of Taliban’s founding supreme leader, Mohammad Omar, who died in 2013.
Ironically, Baradar spent 8 years in prison after being arrested by the C.I.A. in 2010.
Since the Taliban re-gained the levers of power in Afghanistan, Baradar has vowed to build a less repressive society. But, as The Guardian reports, “evidence of Taliban killings, detentions and intimidation is emerging across Afghanistan, ominously contradicting the hardline Islamist group’s promise earlier this week not to take revenge against its opponents.”
Still, Baradar may yield to America’s request for an extended period of time to conduct evacuations. The Times explains:
… the Taliban have an incentive to cooperate. The acting government wants to secure international legitimacy and to try to avoid the isolation the group experienced in the 1990s, when it was last in power. Taliban leaders have urged international governments to maintain their embassies in Afghanistan.
