Pakistan must take action against militants operating within: Mullen

WASHINGTON: US officials say there is mounting evidence that intelligence agencies in Pakistan have been encouraging the Haqqani network in the country to attack US targets.

The allegations, if fully confirmed, heighten a painful dilemma for President Barack Obama's administration. Washington is under growing political pressure to take action against the Haqqani network after a spate of deadly attacks US officials have attributed to it including last week's strike against the American Embassy in Kabul.

Some US intelligence reporting alleges that Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence directorate (ISI) specifically directed, or urged, the Haqqani network to carry out the September 13 attack on the embassy and a NATO headquarters in Kabul, according two US officials and a source familiar with recent US-Pakistan official contacts. However, officials cautioned that this information is uncorroborated.

While American officials have aired allegations of ties between the ISI and the Haqqani network in recent days, they have not publicly cited evidence that the ISI, or elements of it, urged its proxy to attack US targets.

This week, top US officials, including Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Admiral Mike Mullen, demanded that Pakistan's leaders take action against the Haqqanis, who are based in the country’s tribal areas and considered among the most dangerous insurgent groups in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region.

Still, despite the threats and an intensified campaign of violence that threatens US efforts to stabilize Afghanistan, the Obama administration has few options for increasing pressure on Pakistan and none of them are good.

After years of efforts to cajole, coax and threaten Pakistan into cracking down on a host of militants operating from within its borders failed to bear fruit, US officials are exasperated.

One alternative -- another cross-border raid, like the US special forces mission that killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in May -- may be tempting in some quarters of the US government. But the risks are high and the backlash from Pakistan would be fierce, almost certainly harming what counter-terrorism cooperation exists.

"LITTLE LEVERAGE"

"The administration has thrown everything at this -- high-level meetings, tons of money, all of these overtures, and it hasn't gotten us anywhere," said Caroline Wadhams, a security analyst in Washington.

"This can't go on forever," she said, "but the problem is that we have so little leverage."

The long-simmering tension came to a head last week after the brazen attack on the US Embassy in Kabul. It was a major blow as Obama hopes to nudge Afghanistan toward stability and gradually bring home US forces after a decade of war.

Since then, American officials, including Obama's ambassador in Islamabad and Mullen, his top military officer, have issued unusually blunt criticisms of Pakistan's failure to curb the Haqqani group -- and made frank statements accusing Islamabad of links to the group.

Mullen, in a speech to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said Tuesday he had pressed Pakistan's army chief in a four-hour conversation on Friday to break the country's links with the Haqqanis.

"We covered…the need for the Haqqani network to disengage, specifically the need for the ISI to disconnect from Haqqani and from this proxy war that they're fighting," Mullen said.

The Haqqanis, just one of a host of militant groups that have used Pakistan as a base for attacks in Afghanistan, are seen as allied to both al Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban. Supported at times in the past by the CIA, they have had long-standing ties to the ISI.

On Tuesday, regional tensions soared even higher when a suicide bomber killed Burhanuddin Rabbani, the former Afghan president who had headed efforts to secure a peace deal with the Taliban.

While responsibility for the attack remains unclear, the shocking assassination threatened to do even more to reverse a tentative thaw in perpetually dismal US-Pakistan ties a few months after Osama bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad on May 2 this year. The initial conclusion of US government experts is that Rabbani's assassination was carried out by Afghan Taliban and had no connection to the Haqqani network.

Vali Nasr, who until this spring was a senior official in the US State Department's Afghanistan-Pakistan office, said efforts to prompt Pakistani action against militants with increased public pressure had fallen short.

"They are not blinking," he said.

Copyright Reuters, 2011