ISI links with Taliban would not be surprising: Gen David Petraeus

A top US general has said that it would not be surprising if Pakistan's powerful spy agency ISI have links with Islamist extremist groups, who have set up a safe haven in the country's restive tribal region.

Gen David Petraeus, who has been picked up by president Barack Obama to replace Gen Stanley McChrystal as the new
commander of the US-led forces in Afghanistan, said that it is
necessary to figure out if they (ISI) are working with the Taliban to support them or to recruit sources in the Taliban.

"The question is what the character of those links is and what the activities are behind them," he said responding to a question from Senator John McCain at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday.

"Let's remember that we funded the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) to build these organisations when they were the Mujahideen and helping to expel the Soviets from Afghanistan. And so certainly residual links would not be a surprise," Petraeus told US lawmakers.

"Well, again, what we have to always figure out with Pakistan center is, are they working with the Taliban to support the Taliban or to recruit sources in the Taliban," Petraeus said.

"And that's the difficulty, frankly, in trying to assess what the ISI is doing in some of their activities in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, in contacts with the Haqqani network, or the Afghan Taliban," he said.

But for the top commander "there are no questions about the longstanding lengths," referring to the past whenISI mentored and helped in the growth of such terrorist  organisations.

Earlier in his oral testimony, Petraeus said the Taliban which was defeated by the US post-9/11 in Afghanistan, was later successful in establishing a safe haven in the tribal areas of Pakistan.

"In the subsequent years, the extremists were able to recruit, with al-Qaeda establishing new sanctuaries in the tribal areas of Pakistan and the Taliban and its affiliates reentering Afghanistan in an effort to reestablish the control they once had in much of the country," he said.

In light of those developments, our task in Afghanistan is clear, he said. 

"In short, we cannot allow al-Qaeda or other transnational extremist elements to once again establish sanctuaries from which they can launch attacks on our homeland or on our allies," Petraeus asserted.