LAHORE, Pakistan — The top uniformed American military official used an interview on Pakistani television Wednesday to accuse the country’s spy agency of supporting a leading Afghan insurgent group that has been killing GIs in Afghanistan.
The unusually direct remarks from Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who’s been known in the past for playing the “good cop” role on the U.S. side of the rocky relationship between the countries, appeared to signal that Washington was running out of patience with what it suspects is Pakistan’s double-dealing in the war against Islamic extremists in Afghanistan.
Mullen said Pakistan’s premier spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence, has a “relationship” with the Haqqani network — a group close to the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda — that has ended up costing the lives of American soldiers in Afghanistan.
Ties between Islamabad and Washington, close anti-terrorism allies since 2001, have plummeted since January, when a U.S. contractor working for the CIA, Raymond Davis, fatally shot two Pakistani men in Lahore.
Davis said the pair were armed and trying to rob him.
That episode exposed secret CIA operations that spy on extremist groups considered close to the ISI, which has historically nurtured jihad ist groups that fight as its proxies in India and Afghanistan.
The fallout meant the near-cessation of CIA-run drone attacks on suspected extremists in Pakistan’s tribal area after the country’s official protests over the strikes.
“The ISI has a long-standing relationship with the Haqqani network. That doesn’t mean everybody in the ISI. But it’s there,” Mullen said in an interview broadcast Wednesday evening on Geo News, Pakistan’s leading news channel. “I believe, over time, that’s got to change.”
Pakistan denies supporting Haqqani or other militant groups but acknowledges keeping open channels of communication with them, as spy agencies often do. Pakistan’s military says it’s too stretched elsewhere to mount an operation against the Haqqani network, which is based in North Waziristan.
The U.S. also is deeply concerned about the ISI’s relationship to Lashkar-e-Taiba, a jihad ist group that was focused on attacking India but that Washington now thinks has global terrorist ambitions and is becoming a surrogate for al-Qaeda.
It’s thought that Davis was part of an operation to spy on Lashkar-e-Taiba. Mullen said in the interview that he was concerned about the group and a “syndication of terrorist organizations.”
