Here’s some news that may not have reached you: Mullah Omar has been captured. Omar is a Taliban founder and leader, and a top ally of Osama bin Laden, but based on the lack of national news coverage, you might think he was just a low-level grunt. The State Department had a bounty of up to $10 million on Omar for sheltering bin Laden before, during and after 9/11. As Jed Babbin, a former Air Force officer who served as a deputy undersecretary of defense in the George H. W. Bush administration, writes, “The reported Pakistani capture of Taliban founder and overall leader Mullah Omar is potentially a game changing event in the Afghanistan war, with profound implications for the stabilization of Pakistan.”
Not only could Omar provide information that would decimate — at least temporarily — the Taliban, but he also could reveal the extent to which Iran has supported it. However, as Babbin argues, “[W]e need to get the Pakistanis to delay giving him into US custody. That is contrary to our normal instincts, but this man — taken alive and brought to any US detention facility other than Guantanamo Bay — would be Mirandized and pushed into the civilian criminal justice system where he, and his ilk, manifestly don’t belong. We would be forfeiting months of probable success in interrogating him.” Actionable intelligence is key, so we have little time to lose.
Conservative Libertarian Outpost 