WASHINGTON — Pakistan’s intelligence agency aided the insurgents who attacked the American Embassy in Kabul last week, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate on Thursday.
In comments that were the first to directly link Pakistan’s powerful spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, with an assault on the United States, Admiral Mullen went further than any other American official in blaming the ISI for undermining the American military effort in Afghanistan. The United States has long said that the ISI has close links to Afghan insurgents, particularly the Haqqani network, but no one has been as blunt as Admiral Mullen.
Admiral Mullen is to retire at the end of this month, and coming from him the statements carried exceptional weight. He has been the American military official who has led the effort for years to improve cooperation with the Pakistanis. But relations have reached a nadir since American commandoes killed Osama bin Laden deep inside Pakistan in May. Pakistani officials were not told of the raid in advance, and questions remain about whether Pakistani intelligence was sheltering the Qaeda leader.
The attack on the American embassy, and ISI support for the Haqqani network — which also forms one of the most lethal parts of the insurgency attacking American forces in Afghanistan — is the latest point of tension.
Pakistan’s intelligence agency has supported the Haqqanis as a way to further Pakistani influence in Afghanistan. On Thursday Admiral Mullen made clear that support extended to increasingly high-profile attacks aimed directly at the United States.
“With ISI support, Haqqani operatives planned and conducted that truck bomb attack, as well as the assault on our embassy,” Admiral Mullen told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “We also have credible evidence that they were behind the June 28th attack against the Inter-Continental Hotel in Kabul and a host of other smaller but effective operations.”
In short, he said, “the Haqqani network acts as a veritable arm of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency.”
The truck bomb attack that Admiral Mullen referred to occurred at a NATO outpost south of Kabul on Sept. 10, when a cargo vehicle packed with explosives killed at least five people and wounded 77 coalition troops. The injury toll was one of the worst for foreign forces in a single episode in the 10-year-old war.
It is unclear what steps American officials are prepared to take against the Haqqanis, but the increasingly strong public statements indicated that reining in the group has become a more urgent priority as the United States looks to withdraw from Afghanistan and leave a stable country and viable government behind.
On Thursday the Pakistani Interior Minister, Rehman Malik, said his government would “not allow” an American operation aimed at the Haqqani network in North Waziristan.
Mr. Malik seemed to indicate that Obama administration officials had threatened Tuesday in their meetings in Washington with the head of Pakistan’s intelligence agency, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, that American troops were prepared to cross the border from Afghanistan into North Waziristan to attack the Haqqani militants.
“The Pakistan nation will not allow the boots on our ground, never,” Mr. Malik said in an interview with Reuters. “Our government is already co operating with the U.S. — but they also must respect our sovereignty.”
In a meeting in Islamabad Wednesday with the head of the F.B.I., Robert Mueller, Mr. Malik said that the Haqqani network was not present in Pakistan, a statement that American officials said they found disingenuous.
In his remarks to Pakistani reporters Wednesday, Mr. Malik said that if the United States provided information on the whereabouts of the Haqqani network in Pakistan, Pakistani “law enforcement” would go after them.
In making such claims, Mr. Malik was ignoring several years of effort by senior American military officials and diplomats to convince the Pakistani army to launch operations against the Haqqani militants, who are well known to American and Pakistani military officials to be centered around Miram Shah, the main town in North Waziristan.
The Pakistani army has a base in North Waziristan situated not far from compounds of the Haqqani network.
Since the attack on the American Embassy in Kabul, Pakistani military officials have told Pakistani reporters that it is up to the Americans to deal with the Haqqani fighters inside Afghanistan.
The Pakistanis argue they do not have sufficient troops in North Waziristan to take on the Haqqanis. But aside from the main Pakistani objective of keeping the Haqqanis as a friendly force in a post war Afghanistan, some Pakistani military experts say the Pakistani army is reluctant to fight the Haqqanis because there was concern the army would not prevail against them.
No decisions had been made on what actions the Obama administration might take against the Haqqani network in North Waziristan, a senior American official said Thursday.
The options would be discussed at a National Security Council meeting at the White House Monday, he said.
Admiral Mullen testified alongside Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, who told the committee that the attack on the embassy and the assassination this week of Burhanuddin Rabbani, the leader of Afghanistan’s High Peace Council and a former Afghan president, were “a sign of weakness in the insurgency.” He cast the attacks as signs that the Taliban had shifted to high-profile targets in an effort to disrupt the progress the American military has made.
“Over all, we judge this change in tactics to be a result of a shift in momentum in our favor,” Mr. Panetta said.
No one has yet claimed responsibility for the attack on Mr. Rabbani.
Despite his optimistic remarks about American progress, Mr. Panetta said the American military had a difficult job ahead and had to do better in preventing the insurgents from carrying out raids like the one on the embassy. “While overall violence in Afghanistan is trending down — and down substantially in areas where we concentrated the surge — we must be more effective in stopping these attacks and limiting the ability of insurgents to create perceptions of decreasing security,” Mr. Panetta said.
The hearing, called by the panel to review American military policy in Iraq and Afghanistan, was the first for Mr. Panetta as defense secretary.
Like Mr. Panetta, Admiral Mullen sought to cast the recent attacks in Afghanistan in the best possible light. “We must not attribute more weight to these attacks than they deserve,” Admiral Mullen said. “They are serious and significant, but they do not represent a sea change in the odds of military success.”
Admiral Mullen voiced a stern warning to Pakistan, who he said was undermining its own interests as well as the American interest in fighting terror networks in the region.
“In choosing to use violent extremism as an instrument of policy, the government of Pakistan, and most especially the Pakistani army and ISI, jeopardizes not only the prospect of our strategic partnership but Pakistan’s opportunity to be a respected nation with legitimate regional influence,” he said. “They may believe that by using these proxies, they are hedging their bets or redressing what they feel is an imbalance in regional power. But in reality, they have already lost that bet.
“By exporting violence, they’ve eroded their internal security and their position in the region. They have undermined their international credibility and threatened their economic well-being.”
But he said he did not believe he had wasted his time by pouring so much effort into improving ties with Pakistan’s government.
“I’ve done this because I believe that a flawed and difficult relationship is better than no relationship at all,” he said. “Some may argue I’ve wasted my time, that Pakistan is no closer to us than before, and may now have drifted even further away. I disagree. Military cooperation again is warming.”
Elisabeth Bumiller reported from Washington and Jane Perlez from Islamabad, Pakistan. <<<via>>>
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