US officials suspect ISI elements 'directly linked' to Kabul militant attack

Washington, Sept 17(ANI): US officials say they are looking for evidence that directly links Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) elements to this week's 20-hour militant assault against the US Embassy and NATO headquarters in Kabul, according to a news report.

Neither the ISI nor the Pakistani military, of which the spy agency is part, immediately responded to the US suspicions, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Meanwhile, Pakistani government officials dismissed the suspicions as insulting and unfair, the report said.

The American suspicions are being partly fuelled by growing concerns that deteriorating US-Pak relations and the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan may be pushing ISI elements to more closely embrace the Haqqani network, the Taliban faction blamed for this week's violence.

However, US and Afghan officials have stopped short of publicly linking the attack to the ISI, as they did after past attacks in Kabul, such as the 2008 and 2009 bombings of the Indian Embassy in Kabul.

In those and other cases, US officials said that communications intercepts and other intelligence directly linked the ISI to the attacks, the report said, noting that it still took months to reach that conclusion and publicise it.

What is different this time is the speed with which some US officials publicly said they were exploring ISI links, a sign of the growing frustration of US officials who in recent months have become more public in their finger-pointing at Pakistan for its coordination with Islamist militant groups, the report said.

The possibility of ISI involvement was already being considered within hours of the attack's conclusion when President Barack Obama's National Security Council met on Wednesday, a US official was quoted as saying.

According to the report, a senior US defense official said that there is currently no "actionable intelligence" linking Pakistan's spy service to this week's attack, "but we're looking for it-closely."

Given the ISI's history of supporting and sheltering the Haqqanis, it was "almost reflexive" to see if the spy agency had any role in the latest Kabul violence, the official added.

That illustrates the deep vein of mistrust now running through the relationship between both 'war on terror' allies. (ANI)