Word: isis
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...there are fundamental disagreements over Afghanistan. Washington believes that the Pakistani army, through its premier intelligence agency, the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), is continuing to back its traditional clients in the jihadist underworld. "There are challenges associated with the ISI's support, historically, for some groups, and I think it's important that that support ends," Mullen told reporters in Islamabad on Tuesday. In its military operations, Pakistan's army has taken on al-Qaeda and militants fighting inside Pakistan but has not targeted those militants - including Mullah Muhammad Omar, the leader of the Afghan Taliban, believed...
...role of the ISI and these militants will feature prominently in Holbrooke and Mullen's meeting with the Pakistani leadership, says Najam Sethi, a newspaper editor and a prominent supporter of Islamabad's alliance with Washington against militancy. Pakistani politicians and analysts believe that the military establishment, in its enduring efforts to counter Indian influence in the region, is reluctant to change course until there is a Pakistan-friendly regime installed in Kabul and a resolution to the Kashmir dispute. One politician described the fear of being squeezed from both borders as "being caught in a nutcracker." (Find...
...military officials have recently made clear that more than seven years after America went to war against the Taliban, Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) agency continues to provide active support to Taliban forces fighting in Afghanistan. "Fundamentally, the strategic approach with the ISI must change," Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen told CNN last Friday, "and [its] support ... for militants [on both its Afghanistan and India borders] has to fundamentally shift." But the problem is not confined to the ISI or elements within it. In a recent truce between the Pakistani army and local Taliban groups...
...Those in Pakistan's security establishment who maintain ties with the Taliban may, as Musharraf did in 2001, see Pakistan serving as a useful interlocutor with a movement that remains central to Afghanistan's fate. When the New York Times reported last week on the ongoing links between the ISI and the Taliban, it also reported that the British government "has sent several dispatches to Islamabad in recent months asking that the ISI use its strategy meetings with the Taliban to persuade its commanders to scale back violence in Afghanistan before the August presidential election there...
...been markedly weakened and is a shadow of its former self - with only 13 of the 43 armed groups that once comprised it still actively engaged in violence, and with much dissent among them - it is by no means a spent force. Some groups appear to have heeded the ISI's call for unity. The Islamic State of Iraq and Ansar al-Islam - which worked with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi before the U.S. invasion in 2003 - have quietly formed a new alliance, pooling their intelligence and efforts, according to sources within both the insurgency and the Sahwa. (See a brief...