Pakistan resists pressure from U.S.

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration and its allies are pressing Pakistan to end its support for Afghan insurgents linked to al-Qaida, but Pakistani generals are unlikely to be swayed because they increasingly see their interests diverging from those of the United States, U.S. and foreign experts said.

The administration sought to ratchet up the pressure last month by sending top U.S. military and intelligence officials to Pakistan to confront officials there with intelligence linking Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence to the Taliban and other militant Islamist groups.

U.S. move

When that failed to produce the desired response, U.S. officials told news organizations about the visit, and then revealed that the intelligence included an intercepted communication between ISI officers and a pro-Taliban network that carried out a July 7 bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul, the Afghan capital.

The U.S. and Britain privately have demanded that Pakistan move against the Taliban's top leadership, which they contend is based near Quetta, the capital of Pakistan's Baluchistan Province, said a State Department official and a senior NATO defense official, who both requested anonymity because they weren't authorized to speak publicly.

On Friday, however, Pakistan vehemently rejected the allegations of ISI involvement in the Indian Embassy blast, which killed 41 and injured 141.

U.S. officials and experts said there's little chance that Pakistan will take any of the actions it's been asked to take.

"The fact that we're reduced to trying to send messages to the Pakistanis by putting stories in [newspapers] tells you we don't have any good options," said a former senior intelligence official knowledgeable about South Asia. "The trouble is, these kinds of public threats are likely to backfire."

For one thing, the Taliban and other groups allied with al-Qaida could respond to any Pakistani crackdown by stepping up attacks inside Pakistan, which is battling Islamic extremist violence, U.S. officials and experts said.

Furthermore, they said, Pakistan's feud-riddled civilian government has little power over the army and the ISI.

The latest evidence was a botched attempt under U.S. pressure to put the agency under the Interior Ministry before Prime Minister Yousaf Gilani's visit to Washington, D.C., this week.

Pakistani generals and other leaders are also infuriated by President Bush's pursuit of a strategic relationship with India, their foe in three wars, as embodied by a U.S.-Indian civilian nuclear-cooperation pact that won United Nations approval Friday, the U.S. officials and experts said.

"One thing we never understood is that India has always been the major threat for Pakistan," said former U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Wendy Chamberlain, now the president of the Middle East Institute.

Pakistan is alarmed by India's close ties to Afghan President Hamid Karzai and its growing influence in Afghanistan, where a $750 million Indian aid program includes the construction of a strategic highway that will open the landlocked country to Indian goods shipped through ports in Iran.

Pakistan has long coveted Afghanistan as a market, a trade route to Central Asia and a rear area for its army in any new conflict with India.

For these reasons, Pakistan's military leaders may have decided to scale back their cooperation with the Bush administration's war against terrorism and boost support for the Taliban and other militant groups.

"Perverse incentives"

"We have created a set of perverse incentives for the Pakistanis to continue their support for the Taliban," said a U.S. defense official, who requested anonymity to speak frankly. Without a strategy to allay Pakistan's fears, U.S. officials and experts warned, there's little point in sending more U.S. and NATO troops to Afghanistan as Bush, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and his GOP rival, John McCain, all advocate.

Pakistan denies backing the Taliban and other insurgents.

Bush, anxious to maintain Pakistani support in the hunt for Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaida leaders, apparently believed that Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf, the former army chief, would rein in the ISI.

But that hope has proved to be misplaced. Truces forged by the ISI and the Pakistani army freed Taliban and other fighters to fight in Afghanistan, where the worst violence since the 2001 U.S. intervention is claiming higher U.S. casualties than in Iraq for the first time.

On Friday, five more NATO troops were reported killed in eastern Afghanistan, a sector where U.S. troops are stationed.