The commander of NATO troops in Afghanistan plans to confront President Pervez Musharraf with evidence that ISI is training Taliban fighters to attack British troops
Press Trust of India
October 8, 2006
Britain to confront Mush on his Govt support for Taliban
London - The commander of NATO troops in Afghanistan plans to confront President Pervez Musharraf with evidence that ISI is training Taliban fighters to attack British troops in the war-torn country and urge him to arrest deposed militia leader Mullah Omar "hiding in Pakistan".
Lieutenant-General David Richards, British general commanding NATO troops in Afghanistan will fly to Islamabad tomorrow to try to persuade Musharraf to
rein in his military intelligence which he believes is training Taliban fighters to attack British troops.
He also intends to give Gen Musharraf the address of the Taliban leader hiding in a Pakistani city and request that he be arrested.
He says he has satellite pictures and videos of training camps for Taliban soldiers and suicide bombers inside Pakistan.
Captured Taliban fighters and failed suicide bombers have confirmed that they were trained by the Pakistani intelligence service known as the ISI. The information includes an address in the city of Quetta where Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, is said to be living quite openly.
The addresses of other senior members of the Taliban shura, or ruling council, have also been compiled.
Musharraf had publicly acknowledged "a Taliban problem on the Pakistan side of the border", said Richards."Undoubtedly something has got to happen," he was
quoted as saying.
"We've got to accept that the Pakistan government is not omnipotent and it isn't easy but it has to be done and we're working very hard on it. I'm very confident that the Pakistan government's intent is clear and they will be delivering on it." PTI
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Pakistan is in the crosshairs of western military commanders as the source, supplier
Chidanand Rajghatta
WASHINGTON - Pakistan is in the crosshairs of western military commanders as the source, supplier and
instigator of terrorism, notwithstanding periodic certifications from the Bush administration that is a frontline ally in the war on terror.
Commanders from five Nato countries –the US, Britain,Denmark, Canada and Holland - whose troops have just fought the bloodiest battle with the Taliban in five
years, are demanding their governments get tough with Pakistan over the support and sanctuary its security services provide to the Taliban, according to Ahmad Rashid, a prominent Pakistani analyst and author of an well-known book on Taliban.
In a dispatch from Afghanistan that is roiling Washington, Rashid says Nato's report on Operation Medusa, an intense battle that lasted from September 4-17, "demonstrates the extent of the Taliban's military capability and states clearly that Pakistan's Interservices Intelligence (ISI) is involved in supplying it."
Nato commanders, he says, are frustrated that even after Pakistan's military dictator Pervez Musharraf met Bush and Blair last week, Western leaders are declining to call Musharraf's bluff (that he's an ally).
"It is time for an 'either you are with us or against us' delivered bluntly to Musharraf at the highest political level," he quoted one unnamed Nato commander as saying. "Our boys in southern Afghanistan are hurting because of what is coming out of Quetta."
Nato is said to have captured 160 Taliban, many of them Pakistanis who described in detail the ISI's support to the Taliban, just the way jihadis captured in India frequently detail ISI training amid token denials from Islamabad. More than 1000 Taliban, and
not around 500 as reported, were killed in the battle as Pakistan fed them into Afghanistan like cannon fodder.
According to Nato reports, during the September offensive, Taliban fired an estimated 400,000 rounds of ammunition, 2,000 rocket-propelled grenades and
1,000 mortar shells, which slowly arrived in Panjwai from Quetta (in Pakistan) over the spring months.
Ammunition dumps unearthed after the battle showed that the Taliban had stocked over one million rounds in Panjwai. Nato estimated the cost of Taliban ammunition stocks at around L2.6 million.
"The Taliban could not have done this on their own without the ISI," a senior Nato officer was quoted as saying.
Nato commanders are now mapping the entire Taliban support structure in Balochistan, from ISI- run training camps near Quetta to huge ammunition dumps, arrival points for Taliban's new weapons and meeting places of the shura, or leadership council, in Quetta, where the Afghan government believes Mullah Omar is holed up.
Nato and Afghan officers say two training camps for the Taliban are located just outside Quetta, while the group is using hundreds of madrassas where the fighters are housed and fired up ideologically before being sent to the front where they are waved on by Pakistani border guards in contravention of the guarantees given by Musharraf.
None of this should be of any surprise to Washington, where analysts have long said Pakistan is playing a two-faced game of using terror as a policy option to extract concessions from the west while professing peace, as it does with India. Last week, Musharraf suggested in an NBC interview just before he left US
that some retired ISI officials may be involved in backing extremists.
But his claims, while swallowed with difficulty in official Washington, have little credibility in strategic and intelligence circles, where analysts are
increasingly asking why the administration is playing with the lives of US and Nato soldiers to coddle a dictatorship. Some of them are also invoking the results of investigations into the Mumbai blasts implicating ISI to push the Bush administration into
taking a tougher stand.
"(Musharraf) has made a cynical calculation that his own interests will be better served by a truce - or perhaps even an alliance - with the extremists," Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations wrote this week, advising, "President Bush needs to play hardball with him."