Fresh claims of Afghan Taliban chief's arrest

Independent western media reports claimed on Wednesday that Pakistani authorities finally succeeded in capturing the Afghan Taliban chief Mullah Omar.

The Miliblogging site Free Range International, while citing prominent sources from both Afghan and Pakistani officials, claimed that Mullah Omar was captured and put under house arrest by Pakistani top intelligence agency Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) at a undisclosed location.

The website further claimed that the landmark arrest was confirmed by ‘some high ranking sources among NATO forces in Afghanistan having impeccable credentials.’

The claim was made as two top U.S. officials, national security advisor James Jones and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director Leon Panetta, are visiting Pakistan to press Islamabad for devising a more ‘effective’ joint strategy to counter the growing extremism from its tribal areas, causing a continuous spill over onto the U.S. soil, the latest of which was the failed attempt to blow homemade explosives at New York’s Times Square by a U.S. citizens of Pakistani descent, Faisal Shahzad.

Dismissed by experts

Defense analysts and Afghan war experts debunked the claim as baseless, terming it another media stunt in an unending series, saying such claims from non-official quarters have kept surfacing from time to time in order to put pressure on Islamabad for taking ‘extra measures’ against its own Taliban and to exonerate the U.S.-led forces from the guilt of waging a failed but costly war.

“This is not the first time such claim has been made. Recently the U.S. foreign secretary Hillary Clinton also claimed that Pakistani authorities fully knew the hiding places of Mullah Omar and Osama Bin Laden,” said Rahimullah Yusufzai, a veteran expert of Afghan affairs.

“It seems some quarters of U.S. media act in unison with the State Department and Pentagon to exert a calculated pressure on Islamabad, especially when the U.S. officials were engaged or about to hold talks with their Pakistani counterparts,” Yusufzai said.

“Pakistan has waged one of the hardest fought battles known in recent history against Taliban in the tribal region, killing and arresting scores of extremist elements and those posing security threats to Islamabad and the interests of the west, which outshone the nine-year long war by the 26-nation strong NATO forces in Afghanistan,” said Saifullah Khalid, an expert of Afghan affairs and Editor of a newspaper based in Islamabad.

Khalid terms such media reports as an attempt to divert world attention from the failed U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan, and to make a face saving exit from the country as planned by president Obama scheduled for July 2011, by throwing the entire war debris on Islamabad.

He indicated that it was a fact supported by intelligence agencies of the western countries that Mullah Omar had never left Afghan soil ever since Taliban came to power in Afghanistan in 1995.

“Washington is faced with a moral shattering defeat both in Afghanistan and Iraq, and was maneuvering to put pressure on Pakistan from non-official quarters under the influence of Israeli and Indian lobbies,” Khalid said.

Western media reports had been making claims from time to time of having possession of video and audio tapes purporting to have been sent by Taliban leadership and Osama bin Laden. But such tapes were never be verified by independent sources and it was always U.S. intelligence agencies which declared such material to be “authentic” and indicated the time and place where they had been prepared, he said.