The United States has indications that elements in the ISI provide support to the Taliban or al Qaeda militants, senior US military officers said on Friday.Navy Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Army General David Petraeus, head of the US Central Command, said the ISI must stop such activities.
Mullen noted Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence service had links to militants on both its western border with Afghanistan and its eastern border with India. "Fundamentally, the strategic approach with the ISI must change and their support ... for militants, actually on both borders, has to fundamentally shift," he told CNN television's 'Situation Room' programme.
Asked if there were still elements within the ISI who sympathised with or supported al Qaeda and the Taliban, Mullen said: "There are certainly indications that that's the case."
Mullen hoped for more progress but said there was a "trust deficit" between Pakistan and the United States that he and other government officials were working to overcome.
"One of the reasons the regional approach is so important is to de-tension the Kashmir border so that the Pakistani military is not completely tied up on that border, and they are able to train, equip and fight on the western border in the counterinsurgency effort," he said.
Pakistan sees itself as fighting a "two-front" war, in Kashmir and against insurgents in the northwest, he added. Asked about what leverage the United States had over Pakistan, Mullen suggested that aid Washington was offering might be linked to progress in fighting insurgents. "There are linkages between support, aid, whatever the case might be, that I think we need to evaluate in terms of that assistance," he said.
The New York Times, citing anonymous US officials, reported on Wednesday that the Taliban's widening campaign in southern Afghanistan was made possible in part by direct support from ISI operatives.
Also, Petraeus, speaking on PBS television's ëNews Hourà programme, noted some militant groups had been established by the ISI, with the US funding, with the aim of helping drive Soviet forces out of Afghanistan in the 1980s.
"Those links were very strong and some of them, I think, unquestionably ... do remain, to this day. It is much more difficult to tell at what level those links are still established," he said.
Petraeus said there were some cases "in the fairly recent past" in which the ISI appeared to have warned militants that their location had been discovered.
"It's a topic that is of enormous importance, because if there are links and if those continue and if it undermines the (anti-militant) operations, obviously that would be very damaging to the kind of trust that we need to build," he said.
Petraeus' headquarters is responsible for US military operations in a volatile swath of the world which stretches from the Middle East into Central and South Asia.