United Nations: Pakistan`s powerful spy agency ISI continues to have close links with Lashkar-e-Toiba and has used the terror group`s services to foment anti-India passion in Kashmir and elsewhere, a UN report said on Friday.
"The Pakistani military organised and supported the Taliban to take control of Afghanistan in 1996. Similar tactics were used in Kashmir against India after 1989," said
the much-awaited report by UN-appointed independent panel to probe the killing of former Pakistan premier Benazir Bhutto.
The three-member panel concluded that such a policy of the Pakistan military to use terrorists as a tool to achieve its strategic objectives against its neighbours resulted in
active linkages between elements of the military and the Establishment with radical Islamists at the expense of national secular forces.
Noting that the jihadi organisations are Sunni groups based largely in Pakistan`s Punjab, the 65-page report said that members of these groups aided the Taliban effort in Afghanistan at the behest of the ISI and later cultivated ties with al Qaeda and Pakistani Taliban groups.
"The Pakistani military and ISI also used and
supported some of these groups in the Kashmir insurgency after
1989. The bulk of the anti-Indian activity was and still
remains the work of groups such as Lashkar-e-Toiba, which has
close ties with the ISI," said the panel headed by Chile`s UN
ambassador Heraldo Munoz.
"A common characteristic of these jihadi groups was
their adherence to the Deobandi Sunni sect of Islam, their
strong anti-Shia bias, and their use by the Pakistani military
and intelligence agencies in Afghanistan and Kashmir," the
report said.
It said that while several Pakistani current and
former intelligence officials told the Commission that their
agencies no longer had such ties in 2007, but virtually all
independent analysts provided information to the contrary and
affirmed the ongoing nature of many such links.
The report said Qari Saifullah Akhtar, one of the
founders of the extremist Harkat-ul-Jihad Islami (HuJI), was
reportedly one of the ISI`s main links to the Taliban regime
in Afghanistan and is believed to had cultivated ties to Osama
bin Laden, who lived in Afghanistan during that period.
"Akhtar`s one-time deputy Ilyas Kashmiri, who had ties
with the Pakistani military during the Afghan and Kashmir
campaigns, had been a senior aide to bin Laden`s deputy Ayman
al Zawahiri," it said.
"It was such links and connections between elements in
the intelligence agencies and militants, which most concerned
Bhutto and many others who believed that the authorities could
activate these connections to harm her. Given their
clandestine nature, any such connection in an attack on her is
very difficult to detect or prove," the report said.
PTI
