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Washington/Islamabad: A senior US official has taken a critical view of what he termed the new government's failure to prevent the intelligence apparatus from aiding terrorist attacks and supporting the Taliban.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, the state department official said Islamabad needed to speed up efforts to take control of the ISI, the main intelligence agency, after the resignation of Pervez Musharraf as president.
"The position of the ISI has always been ambiguous [but] they may have been more directly involved in actions in more recent months because of lack of supervision," he said, referring to "a lot of allegations" that the agency was involved in the July 7 bombing of the Indian embassy in Afghanistan.
That attack, together with continuing US intelligence reports that Al Qaida has entrenched its position in "safe havens" in Pakistan close to the Afghan border, has deepened Washington's doubts about prospects for military-to-military and intelligence co-operation.
Credible evidence
Senior western diplomats say that last month the US confronted Pakistani officials with what it considered credible evidence documenting the ISI's role in backing extremist groups.
Returning from a trip to Pakistan last month, Mike Mullen, head of the US joint chiefs of staff, had declined to comment on whether the ISI could be weaned off its contacts with Islamist and radical groups, cultivated during Afghanistan's wars in the 1980s and 1990s.
Tariq Fatemi, a former Pakistani senior diplomat, said: "There is a lot of pressure building up on Pakistan to take full charge of the ISI. Rightly or wrongly, people from the outside think the ISI is the source of all their problems."
Senior government officials familiar with security issues said Musharraf's departure had created an opportunity to order high-level personnel changes in the ISI.
"Once there is evidence that the government is in charge, it would be harder for anyone to accuse this agency of indulging in rogue practices and being out of control," one said.
However, US officials were dismayed last month by reports that Pakistan's interior ministry had failed in a bid to put the ISI under its direct control, rather than that of the military.
Referring to the recent uncertainty over Musharraf's future, the US state department official said: "There has been a sense of drift on some of these other [security] issues." But he argued that the former army chief's departure "may be more of an opportunity to focus on serious issues".
He said: "There are signs of lining ISI more directly up in terms of going after the terrorist problem and not being so schizophrenic in terms of how they deal with terrorism. The question is: is it developing fast enough to make a serious inroad on the problem?"
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