US too told Pak about ISI-terror linkage

NEW DELHI: This is not the first time for Pakistan that it is being confronted with evidence about the linkages between terror outfits and the ISI and the existence of terror infrastructure inside that country.
      
After Prime Minister Manmohan Singh asked the Pakistan government to send ISI chief to India to assist in investigations into the serial terror attacks in Mumbai, the Pakistan government decided to send a representative of the ISI but not its head, Lt Gen Shuja Pasha.
      
Earlier this year, a top official of the US Central Intelligence Agency had visited Islamabad incognito to provide information about ties between the Pakistani spy agency and militants operating in that country.
      
CIA's Deputy Director Stephen R Kappes, who went to Islamabad in July, gave Pakistan's top officials information that the Directorate of Inter Services Intelligence had strengthened its ties with some of these outfits which were responsible for a renewed surge of violence in Afghanistan, including the suicide bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul earlier that month.
      
It is learnt that evidence was given to the Pakistani officials about the links of the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence with several terrorist outfits, including the one led by Maulavi Jalaluddin Haqqani, which the US officials believed maintained close ties with top Al Qaeda figures in Pakistan's tribal areas.
      
Kappes' visit to Pakistan was intended to send a blunt message to the authorities to restrain the ISI from being hand-in-glove with militant outfits, including Lashkar-e-Toiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad, which almost openly functioned under various garbs in areas ranging from Muridke (LeT headquarters near Lahore) to Muzaffarabad in Pak-occupied Kashmir, informed sources said.

While these two outfits were responsible for a series of attacks inside India, including the one on Parliament in December 2001, the Haqqani network was responsible for carrying out deadly attacks in Afghanistan and helping Al Qaeda set up base in the western tribal areas of Pakistan.
    
It is still unclear whether the CIA has established that contacts between the ISI and the militant groups were blessed at the highest levels of Pakistan's spy and military services or were carried out by rogue elements in its security apparatus, the sources said.
    
However, Kappes' visit had definitely sent the message to ISI that its once close relationship with the CIA were definitely on the decline. It was the CIA, which along with ISI, had funded and aided the Taliban to take on the Russian troops inside Afghanistan earlier.
    
Security officials in India, the US and Europe have now concluded that those behind the terror strikes in Mumbai would in all probability include terror networks based in Pakistan.
   
Those who actually carried out the audacious attacks would have received some training or support from professionals in the terrorism business and a fair amount of planning must have gone into it.
    
Some experts said the operation bore resemblances to plots orchestrated by Al Qaeda as it involved multiple and simultaneous attacks, mostly targeting foreigners, particularly Americans and Britons, besides taking hostages the occupants of a Jewish building -- Chabad House. 

Another suspect in providing the attackers logistical support was underworld don Dawood Ibrahim, who is also suspected to be staying in Pakistan and enjoying local official support.
    
As investigations into the Mumbai attacks continued in full-swing, the United Nation's Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has estimated that the Taliban has earned up to USD 470 million from the Afghan opium trade this year alone. The money is being used to finance insurgency in Afghanistan and other parts of the globe.
    
The Taliban earned USD 50-70 million from imposing a 10 per cent charge, called 'ushr', on economic activities such as opium farming this year, and USD 200-400 million from levies on opium processing and heroin trafficking, the UNODC said in its 2008 Afghan opium survey.
    
The income does not include money the Taliban are believed to be making from exports of cannabis another widely produced Afghan crop.