Intercept Alerted Us to Pakistan Deceit

Catherine Philp

THE US sent special forces into Pakistan last northern summer after intercepting a call by the Pakistani army chief referring to a notorious Taliban leader as a “strategic asset”, a new book has claimed.

Washington ordered the intercept to confirm suspicions that the Pakistani military was still actively supporting the Taliban while taking millions of dollars in US military aid to fight them, according to The Inheritance, by New York Times correspondent David Sanger.

In a transcript passed to director of national intelligence Mike McConnell in May last year, General Ashfaq Kayani, the military chief who replaced Pervez Musharraf, was overheard referring to Maulavi Jalaluddin Haqqani as “a strategic asset”.

The remark was the first real evidence of the double game that Washington had long suspected Mr Musharraf was playing as he continued receiving US military aid while aiding the Taliban.

Haqqani, a veteran of the anti-Soviet mujaheddin wars of the 1990s, commands a hardline Taliban group based in Waziristan and is credited with introducing suicide bombing into the militants’ arsenal.

Washington later intercepted calls from Pakistani military units to Haqqani, warning him of an impending military operation designed to prove to the US that Islamabad was tackling the militant threat.

“They must have dialled 1-800-HAQQANI” a source told Sanger. “It was something like: ‘Hey, we’re going to hit your place in a few days, so if anyone important is there, you might want to tell them to scram.”‘

The intercept was the clue that led the CIA to uncover evidence of collusion between the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency and Haqqani in a plot to carry out a spectacular bombing in Afghanistan. Two weeks later, India’s embassy in Kabul was bombed, killing 54 people and prompting a CIA mission to Islamabad to challenge the Government with its evidence.

The first cross-border strike took place in early September without Islamabad’s knowledge after Washington concluded that no one could be trusted with the information.

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India is at war but who cares

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