Nato Report: Pakistan Helps The Taliban

Excerpts from Nato report on Taliban

 

"Reflections from detainees indicate that Pakistan's manipulation of Taliban senior leadership continues unabatedly."
"In the last year there has been unprecedented interest, even from GIRoA [Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan] members, in joining the the insurgent cause. Afghan civilians frequently prefer Taliban governance over GIRoA, usually as a result of government corruption, ethnic bias and lack of connection with local religious and tribal leaders. The effectiveness of Taliban governance allows for increased recruitment rates which, subsequently, bolsters their ability to replace losses."

 'More confident'

"The Taliban leadership controls nearly all insurgent activity in Afghanistan. Outside groups such as al-Qaeda, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and others must receive permission from Taliban leaders prior to conducting operations on Afghan territory. Despite public statements suggesting distance between the Taliban and international extremists, no formal split has yet occurred. However many with the Taliban appear prepared to enforce a separation from these groups should they receive orders from the Taliban central shura in Quetta, Pakistan."
"Because Sirajuddin [Haqqani] remains in hiding, his younger brother Badruddin co-ordinates all military operations for the Haqqani network. The group has become highly centralised around Badruddin and very little can occur with his knowledge or consent."
"Senior Taliban representatives, such as Nasiruddin Haqqani, maintain residences in the immediate vicinity of ISI headquarters in Islamabad, Pakistan."

 Pakistan 'knows everything'
 
"The Taliban leadership designated Kabul City a 'free area', in which any commander can conduct operations without prior co-ordination with local command."
"A senior al-Qaeda commander in Kunar province said: 'Pakistan knows everything. They control everything. I can't [expletive] on a tree in Kunar [province] without them watching. The Taliban are not Islam. The Taliban are Islamabad."
"The Taliban continue to openly raise the majority of their revenue through donations. Collectors travel door to door throughout Pakistan requesting donations, without disguising their Taliban affiliation."
 Narcotics trade

 "The narcotics trade provides funds to Taliban operations, though the nature of this process is widely misunderstood. The Taliban does not officially encourage nor discourage narcotics production, and it does not play a direct role in the farming, smuggling, refining or distribution process. However the Taliban regularly collects a percentage of zakat [donation] from any individual involved in any stage of narcotics production. This zakat may be collected in Afghanis, Pakistani rupees or frequently, raw opium or hashish."

 Update

Pakistan denies 'intimate' Taliban links

Pakistan has rejected as "frivolous" a leaked NATO report which claims that the country's security services are helping the Taliban, and suggesting that the group believes it is poised to regain power. The leaking of the report came as Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar visited Kabul on Wednesday for talks aimed at improving strained relations between the antagonistic neighbours. Speaking after talks with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Khar told journalists the report should be disregarded. "We can disregard this as a potentially strategic leak... This is old wine in an even older bottle," she said. Khar's one-day diplomatic visit, scheduled before the report was leaked, was dubbed a "new co-operation phase" by Afghan officials. But while allegations that Pakistan's security services are helping the Taliban have been repeatedly made, the timing of the report's leak, initially reported by the BBC and the UK's Times newspaper, appeared to place fresh strain on already fractured diplomatic ties.

It's quite easy to release a statement about Pakistan's involvement with the Taliban if there was any truth to it.  Reality and history would disagree.  Pakistan's Inter Service Intelligence is the reason the Taliban exists.

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Supporting Terrorism?

Pakistan stands accused of allowing that support to continue. Afghan President Hamid Karzai has repeatedly said Pakistan trains militants and sends them across the border. In May 2006, the British chief of staff for southern Afghanistan told the Guardian, "The thinking piece of the Taliban is out of Quetta in Pakistan. It's the major headquarters." Speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations in September 2006, then-president Pervez Musharraf responded to such accusations, saying, "It is the most ridiculous thought that the Taliban headquarters can be in Quetta." Nevertheless, experts generally suspect Pakistan still provides some support to the Taliban, though probably not to the extent it did in the past. "If they're giving them support, it's access back and forth [to Afghanistan] and the ability to find safe haven," says Kathy Gannon, who covered the region for decades for the Associated Press. Gannon adds that the Afghan Taliban needs Pakistan even less as a safe haven now "because [it has] gained control of more territory inside Afghanistan."

WikiLeaks and the ISI-Taliban nexus

Of all this information, the most troubling concerns the duplicitous double dealing by Pakistan's powerful spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI. While some of the intelligence seems wildly implausible (surely the ISI did not plot to poison Kabul-bound beer, an enormously complex operation with limited pay off since US troops are not allowed to drink alcohol in Afghanistan), the WikiLeaks documents show a continued relationship between the ISI and the Taliban. This is not surprising. In the 1990s, the ISI helped create the Taliban and Pakistani support was decisive to the Taliban's capture of Kabul in 1996. The US has known since 2001 that Pakistan did not break its ties with the Taliban as President Pervez Musharraf had promised President Bush. After all, Mullah Omar and his close associates have been in Pakistan since 2001 and it is not plausible that Pakistan did not know where any of them were.

Role of the Pakistani military

At first the Taliban numbered in the hundreds, and were badly equipped and low on munitions. Within months however 15,000 students arrived from the Madrassas in Pakistan. A Pakistani artillery attack on the border town of Spin Boldak allowed the Taliban to seize the town as well as the munitions dump in Pasha.^[57] According to Peter Tomsen between 1988 and 9/11 hundreds of Pakistani military and ISI officers, along with thousands of regular armed forces personnel had been involved in the fighting in Afghanistan.^[58]
Before September 2001, according to several international sources, 28,000-30,000 Pakistani nationals, 14,000-15,000 Afghan Taliban and 2,000-3,000 Al Qaeda militants were fighting against anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan as a roughly 45,000 strong military force.^{[19][59][18][60]} Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf – then as Chief of Army Staff – was responsible for sending thousands of Pakistanis to fight alongside the Taliban and Bin Laden against the forces of Massoud.^[19][54][61] Of the estimated 28,000 Pakistani nationals fighting in Afghanistan, 8,000 were militants recruited in madrassas filling regular Taliban ranks.^[18] A 1998 document by the U.S. State Department confirms that "20–40 percent of [regular] Taliban soldiers are Pakistani."^[54] The document further states that the parents of those Pakistani nationals "know nothing regarding their child's military involvement with the Taliban until their bodies are brought back to Pakistan."^[54] According to the U.S. State Department report and reports by Human Rights Watch, the other Pakistani nationals fighting in Afghanistan were regular Pakistani soldiers especially from the Frontier Corps but also from the army providing direct combat support.^[14][54]
From 1996 to 2001 the Al Qaeda of Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri became a state within the Taliban state.^[62] Bin Laden sent Arab and Central Asian Al-Qaeda militants to join the fight against the United Front among them his Brigade 055.^[62][63]