Over at NRO, Andy McCarthy points to this piece in Friday’s New York Times. The piece reports on the unification of the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban factions, which have always been (in reality) allied in various ways, to fight American forces in Afghanistan. Some Taliban fighters cited in the piece say that Mullah Omar’s Afghan Taliban delegation was led by Mullah Zakir, a former detainee imprisoned at Guantánamo for several years. The Times reports:
As has been previously reported, Mullah Zakir, aka Abdullah Ghulam Rasoul, is indeed an important Taliban commander. He has been described as one of the Taliban’s chief anti-American surge commanders. The British started raising concerns about his lethality and prominence in the Taliban several months ago. Zakir is responsible for increasingly sophisticated attacks using IED’s and other weaponry, British officials said. And now, the Times‘s reporting adds intriguing new details about the scope of Zakir’s role. Zakir’s story contains important lessons for those who simply repeat the detainees’ claims of innocence without any real inspection. Note that Taliban officials and fighters cited in press accounts have explained that Zakir was always a high-level Taliban leader. It was not his time at Guantánamo that pushed him into the Taliban’s arms. But you wouldn’t know this if you accepted Zakir’s testimony at Guantánamo at face value. During his hearings, Zakir claimed that he was nothing more than a conscript who was “forcefully” armed by the Taliban and sold for a bounty by corrupt Northern Alliance forces. Zakir’s testimony fed into two prominent narratives that are often repeated: many of the detainees have been low-level conscripts unworthy of prolonged detention, and the only reason they were detained is because we paid for them to be turned over. This was probably true in some cases, but not many, and certainly not in Zakir’s case. Zakir was clearly lying. As the Taliban members cited in the press have made clear, Zakir was a top-level commander close to Mullah Omar prior to his detention at Guantánamo. If U.S. forces paid a bounty for him it was for good reasons. During one of his hearings at Guantánamo, Zakir was asked: “Do you like what the United States is doing in Afghanistan now?” Zakir responded: “Yes, I am very happy. I am very pleased like I told you before. They are [re]building my country.” “I [have] never been America’s enemy and I never intend to be,” Zakir insisted. He was lying.
