U.S. officials say Pakistani spy agency released Afghan Taliban insurgents [View All]

[Robb]

Source: Washington Post

The recent capture of the Afghan Taliban's second in command seemed to signal a turning point in Pakistan, an indication that its intelligence agency had gone from helping to cracking down on the militant Islamist group.

But U.S. officials now believe that even as Pakistan's security forces worked with their American counterparts to detain Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar and other insurgents, the country's Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, or ISI, quietly freed at least two senior Afghan Taliban figures it had captured on its own.

U.S. military and intelligence officials said the releases, detected by American spy agencies but not publicly disclosed, are evidence that parts of Pakistan's security establishment continue to support the Afghan Taliban. This assistance underscores how complicated the CIA-ISI relationship remains at a time when the United States and Pakistan are battling insurgencies that straddle the Afghanistan border and are increasingly anxious about how the war in that country will end.

The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity and declined to identify the Taliban figures who were released, citing the secrecy surrounding U.S. monitoring of the ISI. But officials said the freed captives were high-ranking Taliban members and would have been recognizable as insurgents the United States would want in custody.

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/10/AR2010041002111.html?hpid=topnews

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The article goes on to add a commentary from an unnamed US military source that the reason for this "hedging" might be that "...The ISI wants to be able to resort to the hard-power option of supporting groups that can take Kabul, the Afghan capital, if the United States suddenly leaves."

Read that again. A US official is suggesting Pakistan's intelligence agency wants to set up the Taliban to take over Afghanistan when we leave.