NATO: Pakistan helping Afghan Taliban

A secret US military report says the Taliban are preparing to regain control of Afghanistan after Nato-led forces withdraw from the country, backed by the Pakistani authorities. The report, called 'The Stateof the Taliban 2012,' is the latest of a series conducted by an American special operations task force on the basis of interrogations with 4,000 suspected Taliban and Al-Qaeda detainees. The report's conclusions are that the Taliban's strength is for the major part intact despite the NATO military surge, and that significant numbers of Afghan government soldiers are defecting to them. However, those conclusions are in contrast to NATO's official line, according to which the insurgent movement has been severely damaged and demoralised. The secret report was leaked to the BBC and The Times, and it portrays the Taliban as being under the thumb of Pakistan's powerful security agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), but resenting that control. The leaked document claims the Taliban remain defiant and have wide support among the Afghan people. Pakistan on Wednesday hit out angrily at the report accusing its spies of secretly aiding the Afghan Taliban, saying that pre-dawn air strikes killed at least 20 local Taliban fighters. Pakistan's alliance with the United States and NATO plummeted to an all-time low after US air strikes killed 24 Pakistani soldiers on November 26 and Islamabad has since shut its Afghan border to NATO supply convoys. Relations with Afghanistan are also notoriously frosty over mutual blame for insurgencies plaguing both countries, but top-level talks in Kabul on Wednesday had been aimed at charting new cooperation. But the leaked NATO document claims that Islamabad, via Pakistan's ISI intelligence agency, is "intimately involved" with the insurgency and that the Taliban assume victory is inevitable once Western troops leave in 2014. The BBC said the report was based on material from 27,000 interrogations of more than 4,000 captured Taliban and Al-Qaeda operatives. "Pakistan's manipulation of the Taliban senior leadership continues unabatedly," the report was quoted as saying. A meeting Wednesday between Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar was likely to be overshadowed by the NATO report, despite being billed as an effort to get relations back on track. "We are also committed to an Afghan-led and Afghan-owned reconciliation process," Pakistan's foreign ministry spokesman said. Wednesday's talks follow reports that Islamabad and Kabul are keen to open peace talks with the Taliban in Saudi Arabia, separate to US talks in Qatar. Both countries are wary of being sidelined from American peace efforts, focused first on securing an exchange of prisoners with the Taliban. However, the BBC quotes the report as saying: "Pakistan's manipulation of the Taliban senior leadership continues unabated," and says Pakistan is aware of the locations of senior Taliban leaders, some of whom live close to the ISI's headquarters, in Rawalpindi. The document also says that in the last year there has been unprecedented interest, even from members of the Afghan government, in joining the Taliban cause. The BBC's report reads: "Afghan civilians frequently prefer Taliban governance over the Afghan government, usually as a result of government corruption." According also to AFP, the report has evidence that the Taliban are purposely hastening Nato's withdrawal by deliberately reducing their attacks in some areas and then initiating a comprehensive hearts-and-minds campaign. It says that in areas where Isaf has withdrawn, Taliban influence has increased, often with little or no resistance from government security forces. And in many cases, with the active help of the Afghan police and army. When foreign soldiers leave, Afghan security forces are expected to take control. According to the report, rifles, pistols and heavy weapons have been sold by Afghan security forces in bazaars in Pakistan. The document adds that Taliban members "do not receive salaries or other financial incentives for their work", but their operations are funded by the narcotics trade and they frequently take a cut from the trade. Their main revenue, though, is from donations, and they travel around the country from door to door making no secret of their affliation, it says. Over the last week, Pakistan has stepped up fighting in its tribal badlands on the Afghan border, where Pakistani and Afghan Taliban, Al-Qaeda operatives and other Islamist militants have carved out strongholds. Fourteen soldiers have been killed in a bid to restrict the Taliban in Orakzai and Kurram districts, en route to North Waziristan, Pakistan's premier militant bastion where Islamabad has resisted US pressure to wage an offensive. Security officials told AFP that Pakistani warplanes carried out pre-dawn air strikes killing at least 20 Taliban insurgents on Wednesday and that there were reports that a key Pakistani Taliban commander was among the dead. Independent confirmation of death tolls is largely impossible in the tribal belt, a Taliban and Al-Qaeda stronghold barred to journalists and aid workers. The officials said jets bombed four hideouts in Orakzai belonging to Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) commanders Mulla Tufan and Moinuddin at around midnight (1900 GMT Tuesday). "Bases of TTP commanders Mulla Tufan and Moinuddin were destroyed. Reportedly, commander Moinuddin, along with more than 20 terrorists, have been killed," one of the officials told AFP. The bombing comes in the wake of clashes between security forces and militants in neighbouring Kurram in the Jogi mountains, where the military says 52 insurgents and 14 soldiers have been killed since January 25.