ISLAMABAD — Pakistan’s main spy agency continues to train, fund and arm the Taliban despite U.S. pressure to sever ties with the group that Islamabad helped rise to power in Afghanistan in the 1990s, said a research report released Sunday.
The findings could raise tensions between Pakistan and the U.S., which has provided billions of dollars in military assistance to Islamabad since 2001 to help fight the Taliban. U.S. officials believe Pakistan’s support is key to defeating the insurgency.
But the country’s powerful Inter Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, continues to work closely with the Taliban and is even represented on the group’s leadership council, said the report, which was issued by the London School of Economics and is based on interviews with more than a dozen unnamed Taliban commanders.
Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, spokesman for the Pakistani army, which controls ISI, rejected the report, calling it “rubbish.”
“In the past, these kinds of baseless and unsubstantiated allegations have surfaced and we have rejected them,” said Abbas.
Many analysts have suggested in the past that current or former ISI officials have maintained links to the Taliban. But the report offers one of the strongest cases that assistance to the group is official ISI policy, and even extends to the highest levels of the Pakistani government.
“Pakistan’s apparent involvement in a double-game of this scale could have major geopolitical implications and could even provoke U.S. countermeasures,” said the report, which was written by Matt Waldman, a fellow at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.