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Pakistan's ISI: A common enemy of India, Afghanistan
Published on Sun, Jul 20, 2008 at 01:11, Updated at Sun, Jul 20, 2008 in 
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TERROR HUB: The Pakistan-Afganistan border has become the centre of Taliban's activity.
Other stories in the section:
India rebuilds Afghanistan, makes enemies with ISI
Pak’s notorious spy agency suspected for bomb attack on Indian embassy.
Kabul: In 2001, the United States of America and its allies launched the war against terrorism after the world was stunned by the daring attack at the World Trade Centre.
Seven years later Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar are still at large.
Taliban has regrouped but this time just across Afghanistan's southern borders in Pakistan's volatile Federally Administered Tribal Areas and North-West Frontier Province.
"We want peace and security to rebuild this country but we will not allow people to cross our border and attack us. So what we want is the possibility of hot pursuit of those who are crossing our borders and attacking our people and friends," Zalmay Rasoul, National Security Advisor, Afghanistan, says.
People like Baitullah Mehsud are the new sources of Taliban-inspired terrorism emerging in the tribal areas of Pakistan, staging beheadings of those allegedly collaborating with the security forces and launching a series of attacks across the Pakistani border on the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan.
"Baitullah Mehsud is officially announcing in a press conference that we are going to bring jehad in Afghanistan that means what? It is an attack to our soil so we have a right to defend ourselves," says Zalmay.
US Defence Secretary Robert Gates says, "There is a real need to do something on the Pakistani side of the border to bring pressure to bear on the Taliban and some of these other violent groups."
Media reports suggest NATO troops are mobilising on the Afghan side of the Durand Line just days after 15 American soldiers were killed by the Taliban in Southern Afghanistan, close to the Pakistan border.
But it was the suicide bombing of the Indian Embassy on July 7 that forced India and the international community to revisit the close ties between Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) and the Taliban.
"I hold the ISI guilty. I do not hold the Pakistan government pre se necessarily as complicit in this but we'll trust and verify. But I am very clear in my mind the villain of the peace is the ISI," SOT: MK Narayanan, National Security Adviser, says.
"I agree with Mr Narayanan in this view. I name ISI to organize it from the indications that we have. The intelligence service has been behind it," says Rasoul.
Intelligence sources told CNN-IBN that the 324 Field Intelligence Unit attached to the Peshawar-based XI Corps of Pakistan Army was involved in the attack.
Kabul is crawling with Afghan secret service officials looking for Pakistani agents let loose by Adam Khan, the Kabul Station Head of ISI.
The attack on the Indian embassy followed by series of Taliban strikes in Southern Afghanistan killing scores of civilians and NATO troops, many of them Americans provoked Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai to speak his mind.
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