Nato sees ISI-Taliban takeover
The United States military and Nato has said in a secret report that the Taliban, backed by Pakistan, are set to retake control of Afghanistan after Nato-led forces withdraw, raising the prospect of a major failure of Western policy.
The report also exposed the top Taliban leadership’s “manipulation” by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence in a “massive double game”, and claims that the Pakistan government remains “intimately” involved with the Afghan-based terror group. The report leaked on a day when Pakistan’s foreign minister Hina Rabbani Khar arrived in Kabul on a one-day visit.
In Kabul, a spokesman for the Nato-led International Security Assistance Force, Lt. Col. Jimmie Cummings, confirmed the existence of the document, first reported on Wednesday by the BBC and the London Times.
Many of the report’s most serious revelations are on the scale of support to the Taliban provided by Pakistan and the influence that the ISI has on it. “The government of Pakistan remains intimately involved with the Taliban,” London’s Daily Telegraph quoted the report as saying.
The BBC said the report, based on material from 27,000 interrogations with over 4,000 captured Taliban, Al Qaeda and other foreign fighters, fully exposes the extent of the relationship between the ISI and the Taliban.
In Kabul, Ms Hina Rabbani Khar was dismissive. “We can disregard this as a potentially strategic leak... This is old wine in an even older bottle.” The Pakistan foreign office called it “frivolous”, and its spokesman Abdul Basit said in Islamabad: “We are committed to non-interference in Afghanistan.”
The report claims that Pakistan is aware of the locations of senior Taliban. “Senior Taliban representatives, such as Nasiruddin Haqqani, maintain residences in the immediate vicinity of the ISI headquarters in Islamabad.”
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