ISLAMABAD: The Taliban’s top military commander has been arrested in a joint

CIA-Pakistani operation in Pakistan

in a major victory against the

insurgents as US troops push into their heartland in southern Afghanistan, officials said today.

Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the group’s No 2 leader behind Afghan Taliban founder Mullah Mohammad Omar and a close associate of Osama bin Laden, was captured in the southern Pakistani port city of Karachi, two Pakistani intelligence officers and a senior US official said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to release such sensitive information.

One Pakistani officer said Baradar was arrested 10 days ago with the assistance of the United States and “was talking” to his interrogators. Baradar is the most senior Afghan Taliban leader arrested since the beginning of the Afghan war in 2001 following the Sept 11 terror attacks in the United States.

Baradar heads the Taliban’s military council and was elevated in the body after the 2006 death of military chief Mullah Akhtar Mohammed Usmani. He is known to coordinate the movement’s military operations throughout the south and southwest of Afghanistan. His area of direct responsibility stretches over Kandahar, Helmand, Nimroz, Zabul and Uruzgan provinces. According to Interpol, Baradar was the deputy defence minister in the Taliban regime that ruled Afghanistan until it was ousted in the 2001 U.S.-led invasion.

A Taliban spokesman in Afghanistan told The Associated Press that Baradar was still free, though he did not provide any evidence.