The United States has indications that elements of Pakistan's ISI military intelligence agency provide support to Taliban or al-Qaeda militants, senior US military officers have said.
Navy Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Army General David Petraeus, head of US Central Command, said the agency must end such activities.
The officers made their remarks as the United States unveiled a new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, which promises more aid for Pakistan but seeks increased cooperation in the fight against al-Qaeda and Taliban militants in return.
Admiral Mullen noted Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence service had links to militants on both its western border with Afghanistan and its eastern border with India.
"Fundamentally, the strategic approach with the ISI must change and their support ... for militants, actually on both borders, has to fundamentally shift," he told CNN television's Situation Roomprogramme last night.
Asked if there were still elements within the ISI who sympathized with or supported al-Qaeda and the Taliban, he said: "There are certainly indications that that's the case."
Although links between the ISI and Islamist militants are widely suspected, it is rare for senior US officials to talk publicly about them, for fear of damaging possible cooperation with Pakistani authorities.
The New York Times, citing anonymous US officials, reported on Wednesday that the Taliban's widening campaign in southern Afghanistan was made possible in part by direct support from ISI operatives.
A senior US intelligence official, asked yesterday to describe the problem of ISI information-sharing with militants, said, "too big, too often." He said Pakistan had in the past failed to act on "actionable intelligence" that could lead to a strike against militants.
General Petraeus, speaking on PBS television's Newshourprogram, noted some militant groups had been established by the ISI, with US funding, with the aim of helping drive Soviet forces out of Afghanistan in the 1980s. "Those links were very strong and some of them, I think, unquestionably ... do remain, to this day. It is much more difficult to tell at what level those links are still established," he said.
He said there were some cases "in the fairly recent past" in which the ISI appeared to have warned militants that their location had been discovered.
Reuters