Afghanistan's national security adviser called on the West Tuesday to review policy towards Pakistan after leaked Pentagon documents pointed to Pakistani double-dealing in the Afghan war. Kabul has consistently accused Pakistan's intelligence agency of supporting Taliban insurgents - including masterminding attacks against Afghan and US-led targets in the country. Islamabad denies the claims.
Kabul said information contained in documents released on whistleblowing website WikiLeaks on Sunday backed its long-held position. Rangeen Dadfar Spanta, President Hamid Karzai's national security advisor, took issue with US aid to Pakistan, which last year secured a 7.5 billion-dollar non-military package from Congress spread over the next five years.
"It's not justifiable for Afghans to see a country given 11 billion dollars in reconstruction aid and to support its security forces, and then see those same forces training terrorists," said Spanta. "At least we Afghan politicians are not able to explain this to the Afghan people," he said, calling on US and Nato troops to deal with insurgents before they infiltrated Afghanistan from their sanctuaries in Pakistan.
A secretive US drone war routinely targets Taliban and al Qaeda-linked groups holed up in Pakistan's lawless border districts with Afghanistan. Karzai has ordered Spanta and Afghan foreign minister Zalmai Rasoul to "study the leaked US documents," a statement from the president's office said.
Afghanistan's National Security Council (NSC) said the leaked Pentagon documents showed the country's Western allies had an incoherent approach to fighting a Taliban insurgency, now in its ninth year and at its deadliest. "Having a contradictory and unclear policy towards those forces who have used terrorism as a tool of interference and destruction against others has had disastrous consequences," it said in a statement, referring to Pakistan.
The NSC said thousands of Afghans and citizens of allied countries had been killed in the last nine years and called on its international supporters to formulate a united policy to deal with militancy. The leaked documents dating from 2004 to 2009 were released to The New York Times, Britain's Guardian newspaper and Germany's Der Spiegel by WikiLeaks.
Admiral Mike Mullen, the US military's top officer, denied that information in the documents questioned US strategy or relations with Pakistan. Mullen said he was "appalled" at the leak, but that the information had been taken into account during a strategy review last year and that Washington made clear to Islamabad its concerns about possible links to militant groups.
US relations with Pakistan have "dramatically" improved in the past year and Pakistan has launched offensives against Islamist extremists in the north-west, involving tens of thousands of troops, Mullen said. According to the New York Times, Pakistani agents and Taliban representatives meet regularly in secret "to organise networks of militant groups that fight against American soldiers in Afghanistan, and even hatch plots to assassinate Afghan leaders".
Although relations between Kabul and Islamabad have also improved since a civilian government replaced Pakistan's military ruler General Pervez Musharraf in 2008, Afghan and Nato commanders say Taliban leaders operate from Pakistan. The leaked files also indicated that civilian deaths have been covered up, and that Iran is funding Taliban militants eight years after the 2001 US-led invasion ousted the radical Islamist regime from power. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denied those charges in an interview, telling CBS television: "We do not support any group".
Civilian casualties are an extremely sensitive issue in Afghanistan, with leaders fearing that the deaths of ordinary Afghans in military operation encourage people to sympathise with the Taliban. Nato and Afghan authorities are investigating a rocket strike that Karzai said killed 52 civilians in a southern Taliban stronghold last Friday. Nato has denied involvement.
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