Baradar's questioning yields good intelligence

Washington: Interrogations of the Afghan Taliban's No 2 leader have started producing useful intelligence on the group and its operations against US forces across the Pakistani border, US officials said on Tuesday.

Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar was captured in the Pakistani port city of Karachi in late January in a joint operation by the CIA and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency.

Direct US access to Baradar, who is in Pakistani custody, was minimal at first. But US officials said the ISI has eased restrictions and American investigators have been participating regularly and directly in interrogation sessions for at least the past month.

Some of the information given by Baradar, the Afghan Taliban's longtime military commander, has been verified and has been useful to US commanders and intelligence officers and analysts in both Afghanistan and Washington, three US officials involved in the matter said.

They spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue and would not discuss the nature of the information or describe what interrogation methods were used. They said Pakistan was taking the lead.

"These things take time," one US military official said of interrogating Baradar. "It takes time to get the information and it takes time to check out that information."

"He started sharing information that is useful," another official said.

Baradar's arrest was hailed by the commander of US and Nato forces in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, as a potential game-changing development.