Talk:Shakil Afridi

Vagueness about his capture

   The raid went down May 2; we currently have

Afridi was arrested at the Torkham border crossing while trying to flee the country days after the raid.

with a footnote to a NYT article from abt 5 months later. (I haven't seen that whole article, but somebody has marked up a relevant part of it.) I also have a July 11, 2011 McClatchy Newspapers piece (from 2 months after the raid). And a Fox News reporter, cited by BBC coverage 17 months after, including

Dr Afridi was arrested at a checkpoint at Hayatabad on 22 May last year, 20 days after Bin Laden's death.

Despite use of differing terminology for when, and differing place names, the geography is consistent with different ways of describing one failed attempt, within a single day, to cross the border:
-- From Abbottabad, Peshawar is about 200 km W following the fastest route.
-- From Peshawar to Hayatabad (which looks like it's within the west end of Peshawar's quasi-ring-road) is about another 15, again west.
-- From Hayatabad west about 40 km is Landi Kotal;
-- from there, 7 km to Torkham [Pakistan] (GMaps puts that name at the SE edge of the mass of buildings that run almost to the border -- perhaps a military & customs facility rather than home to people not dependent on those government enterprises as their livelihood);
-- there to Afghan border, 950 m.
-- (BTW, Torkham, Afghanistan lies less than 2 km further W by road.)
   I assume the "Hayatabad" checkpoint is thot of as part of the security facilities for screening those intending to use that road to enter Afg either thru "the Torkham border crossing" or by sneaking past it, and thus that those mentioning Torkham and Hayatabad respectively may be using different wordings, without disagreeing about the physical location of a single arrest on the 22nd, "[20] days after the raid".
   I would normally expect "days" to mean less than a week, so "days" misleadingly suggests that the spooks left him to twist in the wind; in contrast, 20 days suggests the likelihood that promptly taking their advice to flee should have succeeded.
   So i'd rather see additional research that would verify a "20 days after" (or otherwise "weeks after") date for a clearly singular arrest, for the benefit of otherwise discriminating readers who don't trace thru as much data and reasoning as i've added in this talk conrib.
--Jerzy•t 05:39, 24 November 2013 (UTC)