Purported Spanish intel report: ISI helped Taliban

October 01, 2008
Purported Spanish intel report: ISI helped Taliban
Posted by Jonathan Landay, McClatchy blog

A Spanish radio station has published on its web site what it says is a 2005 Spanish Defense Ministry intelligence report _ replete with official insignia and stamped "confidential" _ that says Pakistan's premier intelligence service supplied the Taliban with explosives with which to assassinate senior Afghan officials.

News reports say the Spanish government declined to comment on the document. Such silences usually speak for themselves.

U.S. military and intelligence officials have long privately alleged that officials of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate continued supporting the Taliban after Islamabad officially ended its patronage of the Islamic movement following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The document published on the web site of Cadena Ser, Spain's main station for news and information, appears to be the first official report to enter the public domain that makes that allegation. There are more than 700 Spanish troops with NATO's International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan.

Pakistan has repeatedly denied ISI complicity with the Taliban post-Sept. 11, although the agency's director was replaced this week under pressure from the United States. The shakeup follows charges by unnamed U.S. officials that ISI operatives were involved in the July 2008 bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul. The Afghan government also accused the ISI of complicity in a June 2008 attempt to assassinate President Hamid Karzai.

The document published by Cadena Ser is dated August 2005. It says that the ISI supplied improvised explosive devices to the Taliban "to assassinate high-level" Afghan government officials "from a distance."

"They (Taliban) are going to place them (bombs) in vehicles although their targets have not been specified," says the document.

The document says it "is possible" that the ISI was training Taliban fighters to use improvised explosive devices at camps inside Pakistan.

The use of the devices in Afghanistan was "inspired" by the use of similar bombs in Iraq, it says.