ISI's Haqqani ploy against India irks US

NEW DELHI: In what could make the US stance on Pakistan and its massive aid programme less defensible politically for the Obama administration, Washington’s key officials have acknowledged growing unease within the establishment over Islamabad’s rogue spy agency ISI’s continued support for the Haqqani network.

Last month Wikileaks, a whistleblower website, revealed that the Haqqani network had attacked Indian consulates in Afghanistan under instruction from the ISI.

A Wall Street Journal report said US officials are unhappy that some elements of the ISI continue to support the Haqqanis to counter India's presence in the region, and have not dismantled the group. The CIA is using aerial drones and weaponry being diverted by the US military from Afghanistan to step up its anti-terrorism operations in Pakistan, the report said.

“The shift in strategic focus reflects the US view that with Pakistan's military unable or unwilling to do the job, more US force against terrorist sanctuaries in Pakistan is now needed to turn around the struggling Afghan war effort across the border,” the report said.

Pakistan's inability to act against the militants on its own soil leaves a gap that Americans need to fill, according to a former intelligence official. The Pakistani military is tapped out, the official said, adding “they've gone as far as they can go.”

The US military has reportedly loaned Predator and Reaper drones to the CIA, which allowed the intelligence agency to escalate the number of strikes in September, the report said, adding that agency averaged five strikes a week in September, up from an average of two to three per week.

The report said the Pentagon and CIA have ramped up their purchases of drones, but the demand still outweighed the supply. The campaign escalated in the wake of intelligence reports that the world's most wanted terrorist Osama Bin Laden and senior al-Qaeda operatives were plotting to attack a European country — Britain, France or Germany.

The report further said that US officials were speaking about unilateral action inside Pakistan if a terrorist attack hatched inside the country was actually successful. The secret deal to increase the campaign against Pakistan is indicative that the US sees the tribal regions on the Af-Pak border as a source of many of the attacks being plotted and executed against US and NATO troops.