Pakistan’s ISI, a hidden, frustrating power for U.S.

ISLAMABAD: Top U.S. defence officials are concerned some elements of Pakistan’s main spy agency may be interacting improperly with the Taliban and other insurgent groups, a Pentagon spokesman said on Thursday.

Colonel David Lapan said Pakistani army chief, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, himself a former spy chief, was aware of U.S. concerns about the military’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) agency and shared some of them.

Here are some questions and answers about the ISI, the most powerful intelligence agency in Pakistan, a country the United States sees as indispensable to its efforts to tame a raging Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan.

HOW POWERFUL IS THE ISI?

The shadowy military intelligence agency has evolved into what some describe as a state within a state.

Widely feared by Pakistanis, it is believed to have a hidden role in many of

Karzai asks why allies won”t hit Pakistan

KABUL: Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Thursday that Western allies had the ability to strike at Taliban bases in Pakistan, but questioned their willingness to do so.

“The war against terrorism is not in the villages or houses of Afghanistan …but in the sanctuaries, sources of funding and training (of terrorism) and they lie outside Afghanistan,” he told a news conference in the capital.

“It is a different question whether Afghanistan has the ability to tackle this,” he said in response to a question about Pakistan support for the Taliban and why the conflict was dragging on, “… but our allies have this capability the question now is ”why they are not taking action”?” Islamabad”s covert support for the Taliban resurfaced this week with the publication by the whistleblower organization WikiLeaks of tens of thousands of classified documents which point the finger at Pakistan”s spy agency.

Tuesday, in its first reaction to the leak, Afghanistan”s National Security Council said the United States had failed to attack the patrons and supporters of the Taliban hiding in Pakistan throughout the nine-year-old conflict.

The classified documents show current and former members of Pakistan”s spy agency were actively collaborating with the Taliban in plotting attacks in Afghanistan.

Violence in Afghanistan has soared since a troop surge brought to 150,000 the number of foreign forces confronting the Taliban and two other insurgent groups.

Blast at Afghan army base in Kabul, one dead

KABUL: An explosion inside an Afghan army base close to Kabul”s airport on Monday killed one soldier and wounded two others, an official said.

An investigation had been launched to determine what caused the explosion, which happened while army soldiers were in a training session involving heavy weapons, Defence Ministry spokesman Zaher Azimi said.

A security source quoting unconfirmed reports said a soldier had carried out a suicide bomb attack, while a Taliban spokesman said the bomber was a member of the insurgent group.

US trying to thin Taliban with jobs, cash offers

The United States and its allies are stepping up efforts to persuade Afghan insurgents to put down their arms by negotiating with representatives of Mullah Mohammed Omar and other Taliban commanders and offering cash and jobs to low-level fighters, according to Pakistani, Middle Eastern and U.S. officials and analysts, The Washington Times has reported.

The efforts, coupled with an increased U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, are meant to weaken the insurgency and promote a negotiated end to the region’s violence, the paper said. “The strategy is to peel away so many fighters” from the insurgent chiefs that they will be left like “floating icebergs and have no one left to command,” the paper quoted Kenneth Katzman, an Afghanistan specialist at the Congressional Research Service as saying.

A Western diplomat based in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, who asked not to be named, confirmed that Pakistani and Saudi officials are using their “connections and influence within Afghan Taliban to elicit some meaningful way to end the deadlock,” the paper reported.

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US trying to thin Taliban with jobs, cash offers was first posted on December 18, 2009 at 6:53 pm.