Washington, Oct 7(ANI): Pakistan's intelligence agency has ties to a militant group active in Afghanistan, former US Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said.
Gates, at the US Military Academy to receive an award, echoed the sentiments of the recently-departed chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen.
Mullen had said at a Senate hearing last month that the Haqqani network of terrorists was "a veritable arm" of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and that the Pakistani intelligence agency had directed the militant group's recent attacks at US installations in Kabul.
"I think he was at long last giving a voice to what frankly we have known all along, that the Pakistanis were doing this," The Nation quoted Gates, as saying in response to a journalist's question before the award ceremony.
He said that the US has made an effort to "get them to change their hedging strategy, and we're just going to have to keep on working at it."
"I don't know if I'd say it's a 'veritable arm' of the ISI, but there's little question in my mind that they receive support and protection from the ISI," Gates said.
Mullen's remarks had caused a diplomatic storm, forcing the White House to say that it did not endorse the outgoing US military chief's language although it too believed that the Haqqanis were using their bases in Pakistan to attack US and Afghan targets.
"I think Mike's testimony expressed frustration over the fact that safe havens exist, including the Haqqani network safe haven inside Pakistan," US President Barack Obama said in a radio interview last week, when asked about Mullen's testimony at a Senate hearing.
Obama, however, said yesterday that Pakistanis have hedged their bets, in terms of what Afghanistan would look like, and that part of hedging their bets is having "interactions with some of the unsavory characters who they think might end up regaining power in Afghanistan after coalition forces have left."
"What we've tried to persuade Pakistan of is that it is in their interest to have a stable Afghanistan; that they should not be feeling threatened by a stable, independent Afghanistan," he said at a news conference at the White House.
The president said that the US has tried to get conversations between Afghans and Pakistans going more effectively than they have been in the past, but that Washington still has got more work to do in this regard.
"And there is no doubt that there is some connections that the Pakistani military and intelligence services have with certain individuals that we find troubling. And I've said that publicly, and I've said it privately to Pakistani officials as well," he added. (ANI)
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