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Archive for category Afghanistan-Land of Backstabbers

THE GUARDIAN,UK: Pakistan Bin Ladin Commission Official Report Criticizes Pakistan Security Lapses and US acted as a Criminal Thug

Bin Laden killing: official report criticises Pakistan and US

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Leaked report into killing of al-Qaida chief criticises both Pakistan and US, which it says ‘acted like a criminal thug’

  • Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad
Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad: the report repeatedly returns to the remarkable failure of the police, army and civilian authorities to investigate the unusual house where the al-Qaida chief hid for so long. Photograph: Anjum Naveed/AP

 

Pakistan failed to detect Osama bin Laden during the six years he hid in Abbottabad because of the “collective incompetence and negligence” of the country’s intelligence and security forces, the official report into the killing of the al-Qaida chief in 2011 has concluded.

The much anticipated report, a copy of which was obtained by al-Jazeera, is withering in its criticism of Pakistan’s dysfunctional institutions, which were unable to find the world’s most wanted man during his long stay in a major Pakistani city.

“It is a glaring testimony to the collective incompetence and negligence, at the very least, of the security and intelligence community in the Abbottabad area,” said the report, which criticised Pakistan’s military spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (ISI), for having prematurely “closed the book” on Bin Laden in 2005.

Nor does the 336-page document rule out the possibility of involvement by rogue Pakistani intelligence officers, who have been accused of deliberately shielding Bin Laden by some commentators.

“Given the length of stay and the changes of residence of [Bin Laden] and his family in Pakistan … the possibility of some such direct or indirect and “plausibly deniable” support cannot be ruled out, at least, at some level outside formal structures of the intelligence establishment.”


It warns that the influence of radical Islamists inside the armed forces had been “underestimated by senior military officials whom the commission met”.

The document also gives a fascinating glimpse into the day-to-day life of Bin Laden: according to an account given to the Abbottabad Commission by his wives, he wore a wide-brimmed cowboy hat to avoid detection from spy satellites above, liked to have an apple and a bit of chocolate to perk himself up when he was feeling weak, and encouraged his grandchildren to compete over who could tend the best vegetable patch.

The children of one of Bin Laden’s trusted Pakistani couriers knew him as “Miskeen Kaka”, or “poor uncle” – after one asked why the tall Arab never went out on shopping expeditions, the child was told he was too poor to buy anything.

The document also reveals the tantalising moment when the car bin Laden was riding in was stopped by police in the picturesque region of Swat. The policeman was not quick-witted enough to spot the then clean shaven bin Laden and the group were allowed to pass.

In addition to its scorching criticism of Pakistani institutions, the document reflects official fury at the behaviour of the US. It concludes the US “acted like a criminal thug” when it sent the special forces raiding party into Pakistani territory.

It says that the incident was a “national tragedy” because of the “illegal manner in which [Bin Laden] was killed along with three Pakistani citizens”.

It says the operation on 2 May 2011 was an “American act of war against Pakistan” which illustrated the US’s “contemptuous disregard of Pakistan’s sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity in the arrogant certainty of its unmatched military might”.

Begun soon after the dramatic US raid, the judge-led inquiry by the Abbottabad commission heard testimony from some of the country’s most important players, including the ISI chief, Ahmad Shuja Pasha, who shared much of the authors’ despair about Pakistan, warning that it is a “failing state”.

With frank discussion of some of the country’s most sensitive issues, there were real fears it would never be published.

In remarks that will be seized on by critics of the CIA’s use of drone strikes against suspected militants inside Pakistan, Pasha admitted to a “political understanding” on the issue between Islamabad and the US – something Pakistan has always officially denied.

Pasha said there were no written agreements, and that Pakistan did subsequently attempt to stop drone attacks, but added that “it was easier to say no to them at the beginning”.

The former spy chief was scathing about the quality of Pakistan’s civilian leadership, accusing his nominal boss, the defence minister, of failing to have read “the basic documents concerning defence policy”. “There was simply no culture of reading among the political leadership,” and “the thinking process was also non-existent”.

The report also contains much criticism of the US, in particular the CIA for its failure to share intelligence fully with the ISI.

At one point, the CIA gave Pakistan phone numbers to monitor that would ultimately help identify Bin Laden’s personal courier – the all-important lead that eventually brought the manhunt to the al-Qaida chief’s Abbottabad home. The CIA never explained the significance of the phone numbers and the ISI failed to properly monitor them, the report said.

But in a striking echo of US unwillingness to share intelligence with its Pakistani partners, Pasha also said the ISI was reluctant to work with Pakistan’s own law enforcement organisations because “there were too many instances where information shared with the police had been compromised”.

His evidence highlights the ISI’s distrust of and anger at the CIA, which Pasha claimed deliberately prevented Pakistan from claiming the glory for finding Bin Laden, which he said would have improved Pakistan’s international reputation.

The “main agenda of the CIA was to have the ISI declared a terrorist organisation”, he is quoted as saying.

Pasha reports the words of a US spy: “You are so cheap … we can buy you with a visa, with a visit to the US, even with a dinner … we can buy anyone.”

The report asks whether the ISI had been compromised by CIA spies. One lieutenant colonel who “disappeared” with his family the day after the Abbottabad raid had a profile that “matched that of a likely CIA recruit”.

The document repeatedly returns to what it describes as “government implosion syndrome” to explain the failure of any institution to investigate Bin Laden’s unusual hideout.

“How the entire neighbourhood, local officials, police and security and intelligence officials all missed the size, the strange shape, the barbed wire, the lack of cars and visitors … over a period of nearly six years beggars belief,” it says.

It notes that the house was even declared uninhabited in an official survey of the area, even though 26 people were living there at the time.

It says Bin Laden must have required a support network “that could not possibly have been confined to the two Pashtun brothers who worked as his couriers, security guards and general factotums”.

The report says: “Over a period of time an effective intelligence agency should have been able to contact, infiltrate or co-opt them and to develop a whole caseload of information. Apparently, this was not the case.”

It also expresses shock that the US helicopters carrying members of Navy Seal team six were not spotted as they swooped in over Abbottabad on 2 May. A lack of operational radar meant the Pakistani air force only became aware of the attack from media reports after it was over.

 

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MASTER OF DOUBLE CROSS: Hamid Karzai is Pakistan’s Biggest Enemy, Send Terrorists Into Pakistan : He loves India to death but he will double cross it too!

KALA NAAG KARZAI

photograph of an Indian Cobra - Reptiles & Amphibians

 

Karzai’s India Gamble

Pakistan isn’t helping the Afghan government end its standoff with the Taliban — so Karzai is looking to India instead. 

BY MUJIB MASHAL | MAY 31, 2013

KABUL, Afghanistan—Before he set off for India with a wish list of military hardware, Afghan President Hamid Karzai gave negotiations with Pakistan one last chance — at least in principle. On April 24, he traveled to Brussels for a trilateral meeting with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and General Ashfaq Kayani, Pakistan’s chief of Army Staff, whose cooperation is seen as essential for any post-2014 peace deal with the Taliban. The protocol screw-ups were telling: A photo-op from Truman Hall, the residence of the U.S. permanent representative to NATO, shows a startled looking Kerry (standing in front of the wrong flag) betwixt the stonefaced Afghan president and his effective counterpart in Kayani. Pakistan’s civilian foreign secretary, also present on the trip, was not even in the frame.   

Already strained over how to approach negotiations with the Taliban, the relationship between Kabul and Islamabad had reached a new level of intransigence in April over Pakistani plans to build a military gate on what the Afghan government considered its side of the border. Karzai had responded by ordering Afghan troops to remove the gate and any other “Pakistani military installations near the Durand Line,” the contentious British-mandated border between the two countries.

Against this backdrop, it’s little surprise that the Afghan president had given up on Pakistan before he even touched down in Belgium. In trying to resolve the conflict with the Taliban before he leaves office next year, Karzai has repeatedly bent over backward in hopes of securing Pakistani cooperation — often risking political capital at home, where anti-Pakistan sentiment is on the rise. Now, it seems, Karzai no longer wants to wait at Pakistan’s mercy.

According to a source close to Karzai, Kayani actually agreed in the talks to help push the Taliban toward publicly agreeing to negotiate with the Afghan government, but the offer was evidently not trustworthy enough to dissuade the Afghan president from looking to Pakistan’s archrival for assistance. (The July deadline for a similar offer — made at a previous summit in Britain — for a “peace settlement” with the Taliban to be reached “over the next six months” is fast approaching with no progress.) Kerry summed it up aptly before jetting back to Washington: “We are not going to raise expectations or make any kind of promises that can’t be delivered.”

Pakistani observers say support for ending Pakistan’s historically interventionist policies has grown within the government — and to a lesser extent, within the military establishment — in recent years. But there has been little in the way of concrete change: The militant sanctuaries in Pakistan still go unmolested and the Taliban, long rumored to have close ties to Pakistan’s military establishment, have remained resolutely opposed to talks with the government in Kabul. Many believe that Pakistan, ever fearful of encirclement by India, wants to keep Afghanistan unstable after the withdrawal of NATO troops at the end of 2014. 

In sharp contrast with his vocal optimism following previous dialogues, Karzai remained hushed after the Brussels meeting. Soon after he returned home, the border dispute with Pakistan turned deadly, as Afghan soldiers exchanged fire with Pakistani border guards. One Afghan soldier was killed and several Pakistani guards were reportedly wounded. In response, Karzai met with the family of the soldier who died in the clashes and declared him a national hero. The presidential palace then issued a statement on behalf of tribal elders Karzai had met, claiming that Afghan territory extends “as far as Attock,” a city located deep inside Pakistan that borders its Punjab province. For its part, the Afghan media — which mirrored public sentiment — portrayed the events as if Afghanistan were at war with its neighbor. (The Pakistani press, by contrast, hardly mentioned the event, preoccupied as it was with its own historic election.)

Then on May 21, Karzai dealt Pakistan the ultimate snub by travelling to New Delhi in search of military equipment that, according to Indian media included 105 mm howitzer artillery, medium-lift aircraft, bridge-laying equipment, and trucks. No public statements have been made specifically addressing Karzai’s request for hardware, but sources close to the Afghan president suggest that India is sending a military mission to assess Afghanistan’s needs and will most likely provide some of the equipment. After a decade of limiting its $2 billion in assistance to development and reconstruction so as not to irk Pakistan, India seems willing to up the stakes. In New Delhi’s calculation, respect for Pakistani sensitivities hasn’t protected Indians from attacks in the past. Even building a highway cost India 135 casualties — “one human sacrifice…for every kilometer and a half constructed,” as the country’s foreign minister put it.

Other government sources, both Afghan and Indian, however, say that Karzai’s request poses a number of problems, one of which is logistics. India would have to cooperate with Moscow in order to supply the Afghan government, since some of the hardware –like Antonov An-32 aircraft — is manufactured in Russia. It would also have to consult both Moscow and Tehran for transit routes in order to deliver the weapons to landlocked Afghanistan. This gives Pakistan two potential pressure points from which to exert influence over the deal. (Both Russia and Iran have their own fears about allowing arms to be sent to a volatile country so close to home.) Training and maintenance poses another challenge as hardware cannot be simply handed over to inexperienced armed forces.

In public at least, Pakistan is downplaying fears that it will try to derail the arms shipments. “As a sovereign country Afghanistan can pursue its own policies,” Pakistan’s Foreign Secretary Jalil Abbas Jillani told reporters last week. “But we hope that it would mind the overall peace and security situation.”

 

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Robert Baer : Pakistan Spat Highlights Bitter Truths Facing the U.S. in Afghanistan

Pakistan Spat Highlights Bitter Truths Facing the U.S. in Afghanistan

 
AHMAD MASOOD / REUTERS

A NATO helicopter flies next to the building taken over by insurgents during an attack near the U.S. embassy in Kabul on Sept. 13, 2011

What does Pakistan really want in Afghanistan? That question has become all the more urgent since Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, accused Pakistan of being indirectly responsible for last week’s attack on our embassy in Kabul. Reports of a second possible attack, on Sunday, on the building alleged to house the local CIA station will, no doubt, fuel further speculation. Assessing Pakistan’s interests in Afghanistan through the prism of honesty and realpolitik rather than wishful thinking may be the only way we’re going to get out of this messy war.

For a start, we need to understand that Pakistan intends to bring down the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, even if that means taking on its sometime U.S. ally. Pakistan hates Karzai out of a conviction that he has made common cause with Pakistan’s strategic nemesis, India, and a suspicion that the Afghan leader intends to harm Pakistan’s strategic interests in other ways. And, of course, the hatred is mutual. Rightly or wrongly, Karzai believes that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) assassinated his father, and would do the same to him given half a chance.

 

A second misunderstanding we need to dispense with is that the ISI is somehow a rogue organization outside of Pakistan’s chain of command and is pursuing a pro-Taliban agenda all its own. The Pakistani army can remove the ISI director, General Ahmad Shuja Pasha — or any other officer of the organization — at a moment’s notice. So, if the ISI did indeed sponsor an attack on the U.S. embassy in Kabul, such a step should be assumed to have been taken with the consent of the power that be in Pakistan, i.e. the military establishment. The idea that to make our Pakistan problem go away, the ISI needs to be “cleaned up” is naive. The Pakistani actions that make life difficult for the U.S. in Afghanistan are driven by a clear-sighted strategic agenda.

As for the Pakistani proxy accused of carrying out the embassy attack, the Haqqani network, we need to understand why Pakistan won’t give it up or act against it as the U.S. demands. With up to 15,000 fighters and effective control of large parts of eastern Afghanistan and Pakistan’s North Waziristan, the Haqqanis are an indispensible party to a peace settlement in Afghanistan — and a vehicle for securing Pakistan’s interests in that country after the U.S. withdraws. To sever relations with the Haqqanis now would mean Pakistan giving up a large degree of influence in Afghanistan after the war is over.

The U.S. has for years demanded that Pakistan mount a sweeping military offensive in North Waziristan to destroy the Haqqanis, but even if they were so inclined, the fact is that the Pakistani military has only ever been able to control the main roads in North Waziristan. The Pakistani army is incapable of occupying and holding this territory, no matter how much money we offer or how dire the threats we make.

 

At the core of the problem stands a simple proposition: Pakistan doesn’t trust us with Afghanistan — and from Islamabad’s perspective, not without cause. We took a strategic decision to invade a country central to their national-security doctrine without seriously consulting them, preferring to think in terms of an Afghanistan of our dreams. Nor did we take into account their strategic interests and the proxies through which they have pursued them. The Soviet Union made the same mistake when it invaded Afghanistan in 1979.

Having failed to prevail a decade later, we now have two choices, neither of them particularly attractive to Washington. We can attempt to destroy the Haqqani base in North Waziristan by invading Pakistan. But to do that effectively would require more troops than we currently have in Afghanistan. Doing so would obviously destroy whatever relations we still have with Pakistan, with profoundly dangerous consequences in Afghanistan and far beyond.

Alternatively, we could hash out a settlement with Pakistan, which would inevitably mean accepting the Haqqanis and easing out Karzai in any political settlement to the conflict. Such a deal would also potentially bring in Afghanistan’s other neighbor with real strategic interests in the country — Iran. Iran can be unpredictable, but it’s by no means certain it would accept true Pakistani-American collusion in Afghanistan. In the mid-’90s, Iran was all but at war with the Taliban, and if Iran isn’t consulted on a settlement, it could play the spoiler.

Accepting Pakistan’s postconflict agenda and backing off on the Haqqanis at Karzai’s expense is too bitter a pill for Washington to swallow in an election year, so we’ll muddle through for another year. But when the U.S. finally leaves, don’t be surprised to see the Haqqanis in Kabul.

Baer, a former Middle East CIA field officer, is TIME.com‘s intelligence columnist and the author of See No Evil and The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2094844,00.html#ixzz2Wq7RrjUv

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INDIAN PRESS: US-Taliban peace talks: Pakistan’s political fortunes set to revive, India concerned

 

US-Taliban peace talks: Pakistan’s political fortunes set to revive, India concerned

 

Indrani Bagchi, TNN, Jun 20, 2013

 

0,,6626012_4,00NEW DELHI: A prospective Afghan political deal crafted by Kerry and Kayani threatens to sink Karzai. As the Taliban set up an office in Doha to start peace talks with the US dressed up in their old flag and named the Islamic emirate of Afghanistan, in one fell swoop, the gesture has marginalized Hamid Karzai, presaged a future Taliban role in the Afghan government and revived Pakistan’s political fortunes with the US.

The new situation has profoundly negative implications for India’s security, particularly if the Haqqani network is added to the talks as Pakistan desires. India has promised to take up the issue with US secretary of state John Kerryduring the strategic dialogue to be held here next week. In Baghdad, foreign minister Salman Khurshid said, “We have from time to time reminded all stakeholders about the red lines that was drawn by the world community and certainly by the participants should not be touched, should not be erased and should not be violated.” The “red lines” included a renunciation of Taliban’s links with al Qaida and an acceptance of the Afghan constitution. However, its been a couple of years that the US has abandoned all preconditions for talks with the Taliban.

India is one of the largest donors to Afghanistan’s stabilization, but India has a minimal role in the political chess-game currently under way, which will minimize India’s security concerns in the larger transition. Officials in Kabul said, despite repeated assurances to Karzai by the US, the Taliban went ahead to set themselves up almost as a government in exile. Their initial statement said, as an afterthought, that they could even talk to “Afghans”, but not the government. With the Taliban also opening talks with Iran as well as with the former Northern Alliance, the US, helped by Pakistan, could be preparing the way to bring the Taliban back into government in Kabul, a decade after they were removed from power by the US invasion.

For the present, the Taliban in Doha, with the blessings of the US and Qatar, is more than an Afghan insurgent group. Just by the very fact that they are not in Afghanistan, its very easy for them to scale up their international profile to position themselves as a challenger or alternative Afghan government. Its clear the Taliban are sitting at the table because Pakistan has played a key role in getting them there. While Mullah Omar is believed to have agreed to the talks, the fact is that all the Taliban leaders in Doha have a strong Pakistan connection, with their families all living in Pakistan.

According to Pakistani media reports, the deal came about largely because of a personal relationship between Kerry and Kayani. Quoting unnamed Pakistan military officials, a report in Pakistan’s Express Tribune said, “The hardliners among the Taliban ranks did not want to give any space to US forces. They had realised that by stalemating international forces they had actually won militarily. It was Pakistan’s turn to use its influence even though everyone in Washington had deep doubts about the Taliban showing flexibility. Our pitch to the Taliban was that by becoming part of the dialogue process they could gain international sanction, end conflict peacefully and achieve their goals of foreign forces exiting their country much more swiftly than through perpetual conflict.”

Karzai angrily suspended security talks with the US, as Washington scrambled to save the Doha talks by getting the Taliban to take down the offending banner. No peace talks started between the US and Taliban on Thursday, and a visit by the Afghan High Peace Council to Qatar on Friday too was cancelled. In Kabul, Karzai called in envoys from Russia and China and India to brief them on his position, even as Kerry tried to pacify him about the talks.

While the US takes some time to pacify Karzai, sources said the first deals the US would be looking for includes the release of a US soldier, Bowe Bergdahl, in Taliban custody. On Thursday, Taliban spokesmen said he could be released in return for five Taliban prisoners from Guantanamo Bay. The US has not yet agreed to that though there may be some offer of keeping the prisoners in Bagram rather than Cuba.

Second, the US will seek safe passage from the Taliban for their equipment and weapons as they prepare to leave Afghanistan. The Taliban may have entered peace talks but only on Wednesdaythey carried out an attack for which they even claimed responsibility. It’s clear the forthcoming negotiations will be arduous, where the Taliban have the advantage of waiting for their demands to be met, while the US is heading for the exits.

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PAKISTAN BAILS OUT US IN AFGHANISTAN

Pakistan influence on Taliban commanders helped Afghan breakthrough

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By Frank Jack Daniel and Mehreen Zahra-Malik
(Reuters) – ISLAMABAD, Jun 20, 2013 
 
Pakistan’s powerful military has played a central role in convincing Afghanistan’s Taliban rebels to hold talks with the United States, U.S. and Pakistani officials said, a shift from widely held views in Washington that it was obstructing peace in the region. U.S. and Taliban officials were due to meet in Doha, the capital of Qatar, in the next few days, raising hopes for negotiated peace after 12 years of war between American-led forces and the Islamist insurgents.
 
Neighboring Pakistan’s role in the war has been ambiguous – it is a U.S. ally but has a long history of supporting the Taliban as its proxy in Afghanistan, part of its wider jockeying with regional rival India. Western officials believe Pakistan may now calculate that its interest is better served by helping to broker peace that would lead to the emergence of a friendly government in Kabul capable of stabilizing Afghanistan and preventing chaos spilling over the border.
 
Several military and civilian officials told Reuters Pakistan helped persuade the “relevant Taliban commanders” to talk to the Americans and Afghans and also sought to convince them that getting into talks was in their interest. “It would not have been possible without our facilitation. Convincing the Taliban that it was in Afghanistan’s interest and also convincing the other parties that this is what the Taliban actually have in mind,” one senior army officer said. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.
 
Pakistan has a civilian government but the military has ruled the nation for over half of its 66 years of independence and holds sway over large areas of policy, including relations with neighbors. A meeting between U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistan military chief Gen. Ashfaq Kayani in Brussels in April was a turning point in arranging the talks in Doha, said a former senior Pakistani official.
 
“The key was the trilateral meeting hosted by Kerry in Brussels,” said the former official. Pakistan helped get Taliban leaders to a series of secret meetings with representatives of the Afghan government in Europe in recent months that helped pave the way for the planned talks, Pakistan’s foreign ministry told Reuters. “Many of them travelled to Doha and other places and things started moving. We hope this will move on to its ultimate phase where there will be an inter-Afghan dialogue,” foreign ministry spokesman Aizaz Chaudhry said.
 
TERRORIST ORGANISATION
 
The Taliban movement was born in Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan during the Soviet Union’s 1979-1989 occupation of Afghanistan. In 1996, Taliban soldiers swept through their nation and took control of Kabul, many say with the support of Pakistan’s army and its ubiquitous spy agency, the ISI. After the 9/11 bombings and under pressure from Washington, then-president Gen. Pervez Musharraf officially distanced Pakistan from the Taliban and threw its lot in with the United States, making it a strategic ally in the “global war on terror” despite misgivings among his top military brass.
 
But as late as last year, Washington said the Taliban, and the Haqqani faction linked to it, were allied to elements in Pakistan and the ISI. It declared the Haqqani group a terrorist organization in September. “There has in the past been skepticism about their support, but in recent months I think we’ve seen evidence that there is genuine support,” a senior U.S. administration official told reporters on Tuesday about Pakistan’s involvement. “The government of Pakistan has been particularly helpful in urging the other side – that is, the Taliban – to come forward and join in a peace process,” another U.S. official said.
 
With the U.S. troop drawdown in Afghanistan firmly underway, U.S. officials have abandoned long standing demands that Pakistan crack down on Taliban safe havens, and instead sought to enlist Pakistan’s help to promote dialogue. Pakistan military officials say they want to seal a deal in Afghanistan to avoid the risk that instability after the foreign combat mission ends in 2014 will spill across the border and energize a stubborn insurgency by Pakistani militants.
 
However, the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai remains deeply suspicious, fearing Pakistan’s military remains wedded to a time-worn strategy of backing militant proxies such as the Taliban and that it is extending minimal cooperation merely to appease the West.
 
WARY OF INDIA
 
Afghan officials are also concerned that Pakistan might use its influence over the Taliban to steer the shape of any future settlement of who comes to power in Kabul. Pakistan is wary of the close relations between Karzai’s government and India, Islamabad’s old rival. Privately many Pakistan officials admit the country’s past support for Taliban came at an unbearable cost in blood and finance. Pakistani troops are now fighting an insurgency by the Pakistan Taliban, which wants to replace democracy with Sharia law.
 
But some hawks in the security bureaucracy may cringe at the idea of supporting dialogue unless they can be certain that any future settlement will limit the influence of India in Kabul. Pakistan has also sought to bolster its influence in Afghanistan by building bridges with the Northern Alliance, a constellation of anti-Taliban warlords who have traditionally been implacable critics of Islamabad. “You cannot afford to side with one faction, then you turn everybody else against you,” one senior member of the security forces told Reuters.
 
Pakistan is keen to stress that it will remain neutral in substantive peace talks — several officials said Pakistan did not want to sit at the negotiating table, and that such talks would be “Afghan-owned and Afghan-led.” “Pakistan will go all out to support this process,” said Col. Abid Askari, a spokesman for the armed forces, but added: “We don’t want any region or country, including Pakistan, to impose a solution.”
 
(Additional reporting by Matthew Green; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan (note: this journo is Indian))
 

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