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AFGHANISTAN DAILY DIGEST
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From: Ina Iankulova (iiankulova@sorosny.org)
Date: Tue Apr 22 2003 - 13:34:08 EDT
TENSIONS COULD BE LINKED TO ELEMENTS WITHIN PAKISTAN'S INTELLIGENCE SERVICE
Pakistani journalist and Afghanistan expert Ahmed Rashid commented in "Eurasia Insight" on 21 April that Karzai might confront Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf with charges that Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) continues to support the Taliban militia and could be responsible for the border shootout between Afghan and Pakistani forces in the Pashtun tribal belt. According to Rashid, U.S. special envoy to Iraq and Afghanistan Khalilzad (see above), who visited Kabul on 10 April and said the United States will not turn its "face from Afghanistan," afterward met with ISI officials and urged them "to contain the Taliban and come to an agreement" with Karzai to ensure stability in Afghanistan. On 12 February, two ranking members of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee said elements within the ISI are helping the Taliban destabilize the Afghan Transitional Administration (see "RFE/RL Newsline," 13 February 2003). The Taliban's emergence in the Afghan political scene in the mid-1990s was part
ly the brainchild of the ISI, which was seeking a government in Kabul that would be subservient to Islamabad and would secure Afghanistan as a transit route between Pakistan and Central Asia and resolve the border disputes between Kabul and Islamabad. AT
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