The Haqqani network, which is blamed for the recent attack on American embassy in Kabul, receives protection and support from the Pakistani spy agency Inter Services Intelligence, an influential think-tank has told American lawmakers.
The Taliban government in Afghanistan is not going anywhere. That being the case, why is the hesitation to establish formal diplomatic relations with the Taliban? asks Lieutenant General Prakash Katoch (Retd).
'It is important for India that the world also recognises ISI as an organisation that promotes terrorism. If this does not happen the problem will remain,' he said.
Terror groups are building a base in south India and using the sea route to smuggle in arms and drugs.
Bruce Riedel, senior National Security Council official in the Clinton Administration, who spearheaded President Obama's strategic review on Afghanistan and Pakistan, told rediff.com that for all the Pakistani leadership assurances that the ISI has severed its links with terrorist groups like the Lashkar-e-Tayiba and the Taliban, the ISI's association with them is as entrenched as ever.
Amid speculation that his party was being covertly backed by the Pakistan's powerful spy agency Inter-Services Intelligence, cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan on Monday vowed to "quit politics" if the claim was proved.
Pakistan and its spy agency Inter-Services Intelligence had played a vital role in imparting training to convicts to handle weapons and explosives, which materialised in the 1993 Mumbai serial blasts, the Supreme Court held.
Top Taliban leader Mullah Omar was sheltered by Pakistan's powerful spy agency Inter-Services intelligence after the outfit's leadership fled from Afghanistan in 2001, according to an email received by former secretary of state Hillary Clinton during her tenure.
India has much paranoia in India about a new 'Terroristan' coming up between Pakistan and a Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. Pakistan has zero ability economically, diplomatically, geostrategically or militarily to create one. If they try, it will be great for India as they will destroy themselves yet again, asserts Shekhar Gupta.
Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) president Sharif, 70, and Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) vice-chairman and former foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi on Sunday filed their nomination papers for the post.
Pakistan's spy agency Inter-Services Intelligence sponsors terrorism in Kashmir and it oversees terrorist groups there, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has said in the first-ever open acknowledgment by a United States agency that Islamabad is a 'State Sponsor of Terrorism'.
Gupta, 53, posted as Second Secretary (Press and Information) at Indian High Commission in Islamabad, was arrested on April 22, 2010 by the Special Cell of Delhi Police for passing on sensitive information pertaining to defence to Pakistan's ISI.
Separatists and their wide network must be neutralized for peace in the Valley
Al-Qaeda's reclusive chief Ayman al-Zawahiri is cut off from his top commanders and keeping the outfit afloat only through loyalty as the once world's most feared terror group is steadily losing recruits and funding sources to its splinter faction -- the Islamic State.
Union Minister of State for Home Mullapally Ramachandran told rediff.com on Monday that there were certain individuals and organisations in the state, which were facilitating the activities of the ISI and said that the Union government would take stringent action against them.
Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence chief Lt Gen Rizwan Akhtar has left for the US on his maiden visit to hold talks with top American officials on regional security, counter terrorism and intelligence issues.
'The last thing he would want is new tensions with India.'
Slamming Pakistan for failing to check terror groups operating from its soil against India, the Bharatiya Janata Party on Wednesday demanded that organisations like Pakistan's Inter State Intelligence be put under "international watch" and the US government be asked to stop extending financial aid to it as it was being misused.
The hour-long meeting, also attended by National Security Advisor Ajit Doval and senior home ministry officials, apprised the Muslim clerics about activities of the West Asian terrorist group and its efforts to attract Indian youth to its fold.
"I have read about the ISI chief's statement in the media but I don't think the intelligence agency has stopped monitoring the activities of our politicians," a senior leader of the ruling Pakistan People's Party, who did not want to be named, said.
In his latest book 'Playing to the Edge', Michael Hayden, the former CIA director said that Pasha had conceded that some of the powerful spy agency's retired members were engaged in training those involved in the heinous crime but refused to take action.
'I actually believe it's not all that appropriate that there be an Indian Consul on the border with Pakistan,' says Afghan expert Sarah Chayes.
General Taj has been closely associated with Musharraf, having been his military secretary at the time of the 1999 coup.
A Delhi court on Tuesday acquitted five people who were arrested for allegedly plotting to kill Tehelka magazine scribes Tarun Tejpal and Anirudh Bahl in May 2001.
In a new revelation, Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari has said that the CIA of the United States and his country's ISI together created the Taliban.
'There is no harm in our giving a try to the idea of an informal, clandestine one-to-one liaison relationship between the ISI and R&AW. We should not have any illusions that it would result in a sharing of actionable intelligence. Intelligence agencies share actionable intelligence only when they have common State and non-State enemies. India and Pakistan do not have common enemies.'
India on Wednesday said Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence still continues to train terror groups. "There is no change in the attitude of the ISI to train terror groups like the Lashkar-e-Toiba and the Jaish-e-Mohammad. Their attacks are likely to continue," National Security Advisor M K Narayanan said.
Ayman al-Zawahiri, who has been appointed the Al Qaeda chief following the killing of Osama bin Laden, is probably hiding in Pakistan and can be nabbed by the Inter Services Intelligence if it "really wants" to do so, a top United States Senator has said.
'By convention, the prime minister is technically kept in the loop for the DG, ISI's appointment.' 'It remains to be seen if Prime Minister Imran Khan is able to indicate any preference by then,' says Rana Banerji, who headed the Pakistan Desk at the Research and Analysis Wing, India's external intelligence agency.
Top Lashkar-e-Tayiba bomb expert Abdul Karim Tunda told interrogators that he had come in contact with Pakistan's spy agency Inter Services Intelligence after meeting former ISI Chief Hamid Gul in 1995 and was in constant touch with him thereafter.
An "active member" of Pakistan's Inter State Intelligence, who was living in India for the last five years, was arrested in Ludhiana on Thursday, the police said.
The ISI had forged ties with jihadi groups throughout the 1980s when the CIA used it to support the Mujahideen against the Soviet Army in Afghanistan and when it saw an opportunity in 1989 to weaken India by creating trouble in Jammu and Kashmir, the outfit's terrorists were infiltrated into India, the newspaper reported.
The Islamic State is preparing to attack India to provoke an Armageddon-like confrontation with the United States, according to an internal recruitment document of the feared group which also seeks to unite the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban into a single army of terror.
Pak had realised in 2018 that Hurriyat Conference, the separatist conglomerate created by Inter-Services Intelligence, won't be able to deliver any more
'The military in Pakistan is capable and self critical, but intelligence is stuffed full of lifers who resist change, which is why career soldiers in Pakistan try with all their might not to be transferred into the ISI.'
The ISI's new terror matrix comprises three major terrorist groups, at least half-a-dozen big and small front organisations with extremist ideology, spanning three countries.
Hamza, who started off as a low-level operative with the Lashkar-e-Tayiba, has today become one of India's biggest headaches. He threatens to battle Indian forces not only in the Kashmir Valley, but in other parts of India as well.
Saying that the branch along with counter-terrorism section were critical wings of the ISI, Ijaz has alleged that the S Branch conspires intervention in other countries like Afghanistan as well as manipulate elections, politicians and groups within Pakistan.
An architect regularly employed by the Inter Services Intelligence worked on the compound in which Osama bin Laden sheltered for years in Abbottabad and the slain Al Qaeda chief communicated regularly with Lashkar-e-Tayiba from his hideout, a media report said on Saturday.
