'Pak army will never forsake LeT for US aid'

LONDON: Pakistan's army and ISI are covertly sponsoring four militant groups, including LeT, and will not abandon them for any amount of US money, the American envoy to Islamabad wrote in a secret review in 2009, diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks show.

According to a report in The Guardian on Wednesday, the review said that Pakistan had received more than $16 billion in American aid since 2001, but "there is no chance that Pakistan will view enhanced assistance... as sufficient compensation for abandoning support to these groups", Anne Patterson wrote in the review of Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy in September 2009.

Secret cables, which were leaked by WikiLeaks, show that US diplomats and spies believe Pakistan army and its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) continue to quietly back four militant groups — the Afghan Taliban, its allied Haqqani and Hekmatyar networks on the western Afghan frontier, and LeT on the eastern border with India.

Some ISI officials "continue to maintain ties with a wide array of extremist organisations, in particular the Taliban, LeT and other extremist organizations," US secretary of state Hillary Clinton wrote in December 2009.
Resolving the 63-year-old Kashmir conflict "would dramatically improve the situation", Patterson said.

Patterson also underpinned the need for the US to reassess India's role in Afghanistan and the growing Indo-US relationship.

"We need to reassess Indian involvement in Afghanistan and our own policies towards India, including the growing military relationship through sizeable conventional arms sales, as all of this feeds Pakistani establishment paranoia and pushes them closer to both Afghan and Kashmir-focused terrorist groups while reinforcing doubts about US intentions," she said.

The latest cache of WikiLeaks documents also lay bare the deep concern of US over the safety of Pakistan's nuclear weapons and the fact that Islamabad is producing them at a "faster rate than any other country in the world".

Painting a damning picture of its "ally", American officials expressed serious misgivings about the possibility of elements within the Pakistan establishment smuggling enough material out to eventually make a rogue nuclear weapon.