US special envoy Richard Holbrooke said that he is agnostic about whether Pakistan had decisively turned against the Afghan Taliban. Holbrooke made the comment in an interview with the Financial Times in relation to Pakistan's arrest of the Afghan Taliban's operational commander Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. "Everyone has asked the same question. How do you know? Have we turned a corner? I'm not prepared to make those judgments, and you'll have to ask the Pakistanis that," he said. "I'm an agnostic at this point as to whether this was a policy change [by Islamabad] or a serendipitous collection of discreet events." He said he was not prepared to make a judgement on whether relations between the United States and Pakistan had turned a corner after Baradar's arrest. Holbrooke declined to say whether the US was getting good intelligence from the joint interrogation of Mullah Baradar. But he said he had "no problems" with the Lahore High Court's denial of a request last week to transfer the Taliban commander to Afghanistan. Regarding military operations in Afghanistan, Holbrooke said the US and its allies faced a "daunting" task there and "it is much too early" to predict how the situation will turn out. "You can't occupy every piece of terrain, so the real key is building and transferring [control to the Afghan security forces]," Mr Holbrooke said Mr Holbrooke said the task of training competent police and military forces was "an extraordinarily difficult part of the process". On the timing of US withdrawal from Afghanistan, he said President Barack Obama would keep his pledge to begin pulling out in July 2011. "Some people have either wilfully or through ignorance misrepresented that as the withdrawal date. It's the beginning of withdrawals at a pace and size [to be] determined by the situation."