Great news. The kidnapped atomic energy guys I blogged about yesterday were all rescued, and several of their captors dispatched in a gunbattle with Pakistani police. (Unfortunately a constable was killed in the shootout as well.)

One of the wounded kidnappers is singing like a bird, and he says that his local Taliban commander sent them on this raid:

An injured kidnapper told interrogators that their local Taliban chief, Amir Ahmed Gul, had told them that they were going to attack a foreigners’ camp in Thall. He said they did not know that the chief would use them for kidnapping people. He said they were taking the kidnapped people and the vehicles to the seminary of Maulana Jalaluddin Haqqani near the cattle market in North Waziristan.

However, the interrogators said that the kidnappers were posing themselves as Taliban to misguide them.

(OK, who were they really, then? Plain old criminal kidnappers? Al-Qaeda? Freemasons?)

NOW REWIND THE TAPE a second for the important part. The Taliban kidnappers were taking these guys to “the seminary of Maulana Jalaluddin Haqqani near the cattle market in North Waziristan”. Haqqani is a near-legendary Taliban commander-at-large whom the U.S. insists is operating out of Pakistan.

Yesterday, Pervez Musharraf attempted to “debunk” that claim:

ISLAMABAD: President Gen Pervez Musharraf on Monday rejected US Maj Gen Benjamin Freakley’s claim that Jalaluddin Haqqani was perating [sic] from inside Pakistan to foment violence in Afghanistan, and said that the “baseless allegations” could harm Pak-US cooperation in the war on terror.

Now there’s this inconvenient shot-up Taliban kidnapper who supports Freakley’s take on things. Oopsie.

This is important in the ongoing debate with Pakistan about how to root out the Taliban forces sheltering there, and how much of a free hand the U.S. will have in engaging them. (Current Pakistani answer: not much.) Claims that Pakistan is a Taliban-free zone, and that no international assistance will be necessary, look more and more ridiculous as stories like this one emerge.

P.S. Let’s not jump to any conclusions about the Taliban abducting nuclear scientists here. It looks like the place where these guys worked was some sort of uranium mine camp, and today’s story seems to have demoted them from Atomic Energy “officials” to “employees”. They could have been mine workers. It gets one raised eyebrow, but I don’t see that we can definitely ascribe any motive to this raid based on what’s in these stories.

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