| | Afghanistan war logs: Recriminations fly over alleged support for Taliban The Guardian
07/29/2010
By Ewen MacAskill in Washington, Saeed Shah in Islamabad and Jason Burke in Delhi
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Leaked documents reveal hand of Pakistan's spy agency behind insurgency, say officials in Afghanistan and India
The leak of thousands of US military documents about the Afghanistan war yesterday placed a strain on Pakistan's relations with both Afghanistan and America.
As members of the US Congress raised questions about Pakistan's alleged support for the Taliban, officials in Islamabad and Kabul also traded angry accusations on the same issue.
The leaked documents suggest – but without providing definitive evidence – that Pakistan's spy agency, the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence), has been collaborating with the Taliban.
The White House, attempting to defuse the row, said the documents mainly covered the period before Barack Obama launched his new Afghanistan strategy last year, and that Pakistan since then had taken action against insurgents, though not going as far as the US would like.
But in Kabul, Waheed Omar, a spokesman for the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, was blunt in attributing blame. Referring to Pakistan, he said: "The war on terrorism will not succeed unless we address the root causes … the role forces behind the borders of Afghanistan play in destabilising activity here in Afghanistan."
He added: "We will not be able to defeat terrorism in the villages of Afghanistan unless we pay attention to the places where terrorism has been nurtured, where terrorists are kept, where they are given sanctuary, where they are given ideal motives to carry out their attacks in Afghanistan."
But an ISI official questioned the reliability of Afghan intelligence gathering. "The majority of these [documents] are preliminary reports and they are mostly from Afghan intelligence, so you can imagine their credibility," the official said.
The testy exchanges came after a short period in which relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan had been improving. This was uppermost in the minds of the Obama administration on learning last week about the leaked documents.
At a White House briefing yesterday, Obama's spokesman, Robert Gibbs, offered only qualified support for Pakistan, saying Obama had made it clear last year that Pakistan would not be receiving a blank cheque and had to make progress in taking on insurgents. There had been Pakistani military operations in the Swat valley and South Waziristan, but he added that more were expected.
As well as outrage in the US over the allegations about Pakistan, there was anger that the leak might have endangered the lives of the US military and their allies.
Gibbs described the leaks as "posing a very real and potential threat to those who are working every day to keep us safe" and labelled it as "a criminal act".
The Pentagon has launched an inquiry into the identity of the leaker, and is reviewing all the documents to see if any pose a risk to the lives of the US military, a process that could take days or months.
Wikileaks obtained the documents through a source within the Pentagon.
The documents appear to show that Pakistan intelligence officials were aiding the Taliban, in contrast with statements by US officials that Pakistan is America's ally in the fight against the Taliban.
Lieutenant-colonel Tony Shaffer, a former intelligence officer and now an analyst at the Centre for Advanced Defence Studies, drew an analogy with the second world war, saying the ISI/Taliban relationship was akin to the British working with the Nazis leaking information about Normandy.
The ISI has in the past worked with the Taliban, seeing it as a bulwark against any Indian attempts to increase its influence in Afghanistan.
Pakistan rejected the allegations in the US military documents as false, with the ISI official suggesting the leaked material was only preliminary reports. "Only once something is corroborated from multiple sources does it become a credible piece of information," the ISI official said.
Pakistan's foreign ministry spokesman, Abdul Basit, called the leaks "far-fetched and skewed".
Hamid Gul, 74, a former ISI chief extensively cited in the documents as meeting and aiding the Taliban, described it as "a pack of lies, a fairytale". He denied having contact with the Taliban, though he was happy to voice his moral support for them. Gul said: "I'm just the whipping boy."
Pakistan's long-term rival, India, joined Afghanistan in saying the leaks confirmed what Delhi had been saying for years about Islamabad's behaviour in Afghanistan. Indian officials said the documents "confirmed what India has been telling for a long time".
The German government said it planned to investigate amid concern that the information might put its troops in danger.
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