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| July 27, 2010: Classified federal government documents suggest that members of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate had met with members of the Taliban to organize militias to fight against U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan and to plot assassinations of Afghan leaders, according to Wikileaks, The New York Times and Bloomberg. Covert Pakistani aid to the Taliban has been alleged for years by retired U.S. officials who have worked on Afghanistan issues, and by independent soldiers. “However illegally these documents came to light, they raise serious questions about the reality of America’s policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan,” U.S. Sen. John Kerry, Massachusetts Democrat, said in a statement. “Those policies are at a critical stage and these documents may very well underscore the stakes and make the calibrations needed to get the policy right more urgent.” Pakistan officials said that the disclosure of about 92,000 classified documents on the war in Afghanistan wouldn’t affect its relations with the U.S. or its role in the conflict after the White House condemned the leak. “These things have been regurgitated from time to time by the media or by low-level officials without any endorsement by the U.S. government,” Farhatullah Babar, the spokesman for Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, said in a phone interview from Islamabad. “There is nothing much in this.” However, the release of the documents by Wikileaks, which provided the papers to The New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel. A theme in the reports is allegations that Pakistan’s main intelligence agency is secretly aiding the Taliban and allied Islamic militant rebels that the U.S. is trying to defeat, reported the newspapers, whose officials said Wikileaks gave them weeks of access to the documents. The documents show that Taliban insurgents have used portable heat-seeking missiles against allied aircraft, something that hadn’t been disclosed by the military, the Times said. The reports also provide information about secret commando units seeking to capture or kill top insurgent leaders, and the use of CIA paramilitary operations inside Afghanistan, the newspaper said. The reports suggest that the Taliban’s use of heat-seeking missiles “has been neither common nor especially effective; usually the missiles missed,” the Times said. The Guardian said the documents show that allied troops have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents. In addition, it said, “Taliban attacks have soared and NATO commanders fear neighboring Pakistan and Iran are fuelling the insurgency,” referring to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Der Spiegel said all three publications vetted the documents, compared them with independent reports and concluded they were authentic. The reports were mostly written by Sergeants, Der Spiegel said. “Nearly nine years after the start of the war, they paint a gloomy picture,” Der Spiegel said. “They portray Afghan security forces as the hapless victims of Taliban attacks. They also offer a conflicting impression of the deployment of drones, noting that America’s miracle weapons are also entirely vulnerable.” |
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