The U.S. military was closely tracking a one-eyed bandit across the Sahara in 2003 when it confronted a hard choice that is still reverberating a decade later. Should it try to kill or capture the target, an Algerian jihadist named Mokhtar Belmokhtar, or let him go?
Belmokhtar had trained at militant camps in Afghanistan in the 1990s, returned home to join a bloody revolt and was about to be blacklisted by the United Nations for supporting the Taliban and al-Qaeda. But he hadn’t yet attacked Americans and did not appear to pose a threat outside his nomadic range in the badlands of northern Mali and southern Algeria.
looking beyond borders 