Col. Daniel S. Roper, director, U.S. Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Center, discusses lessons learned in counterinsurgency with Brigadier Farhat Abbas Sani, Pakistan Military Air Defense brigade commander, during the Third Army/U.S. Army Central's Counterinsurgency Information Exchange in Atlanta. Photo Credit: Third Army

Pakistan has agreed to hand over Taliban second in command, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, to Afghan authorities, Reuters reported this morning. Little information beyond the bare facts about that are known, but the decision appears to have been made after a tripartite meeting between Pakistan, the US, and Afghanistan.

Pakistan has played an increasing part in the fight against the Taliban over just the last few weeks: The Christian Science Monitor, in an exclusive yesterday, reported that Pakistani officials say they have arrested seven out of the Taliban’s 15 senior leaders. The Monitor then suggested that Pakistan’s “crackdown” on Taliban officials may be part of a larger bid to secure a seat at the negotiating table.

It’s not a particularly original view – ever since Pakistan leapt into the limelight with the capture of the Taliban’s military commander in Afghanistan, Western media outlets have seen their increased cooperation as an attempt to protect their influence in Afghanistan once the fighting has ended. Western powers have long put pressure on Pakistan to step up its fight against the Taliban, while also claiming that Pakistan was still surreptitiously supporting the insurgency.

The New York Times, in one of their lead stories today, reported that the CIA and its counterpart in Pakistan, the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, are working together, but warily. In a nice turn of phrase, The New York Times wrote today, “[T]eams of Pakistani and American spies have kept a watchful eye on a senior Taliban leader captured last month. With the other eye, they watch each other.”

However wary they may be, their joint operations have dealt a short-term blow to the Taliban, analysts told the Monitor; that’s cause for some celebration. “Successful missions sometimes end with American and Pakistani spies toasting one another with Johnnie Walker Blue Label whisky, a gift from the C.I.A.,” The New York Times reported.

Both sides appear to be getting past their native suspicion of one another (perhaps with the help of Johnnie Walker) to share intelligence in real time, TIME magazine wrote on Tuesday. But this tentative friendship also stands to unravel: TIME noted that one big point of contention between the two is the notoriously vicious Haqqani clan, a semi-independent insurgent group of eastern Afghanistan and the Waziristan area of Pakistan that has sworn loyalty to the Taliban. NATO sees these guys as a major threat and is calling on Pakistan to help rout them out; Pakistan, however, has kept close ties to the clan since the days of the Soviet menace in the 1980s. Pakistani officials say they will clear out the Haqqanis, just not quite yet, claiming their troops are too busy fighting tribal insurgencies in other parts of the country to deal with the Haqqanis.