‘Pak created terror groups to check India, Afghanistan’

Pakistan created terror groups such as the Taliban, the Haqqani network and the Lashkar-e-Taiba to keep India “off balance” and protect Islamabad’s interests in war-torn Afghanistan, according to former US diplomats and officials.

William Milam, a former US ambassador to Pakistan, and Philip Reiner, a former senior director for South Asia at the National Security Council during the Obama administration, said Pakistan's notorious spy agency, the ISI, continues to protect and assist these groups, according to The Cipher Brief.

The online intelligence news and analysis portal on Thursday carried interviews and opinion pieces deciphering the “double game” of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

Milan told the portal that Pakistan has “no interest in a peaceful Afghanistan that would be under the influence of its arch enemy India and feels keenly the need for a proxy to protect its interests there.”

“We know that Pakistan was present at the creation of the Taliban in the mid1990s and gave them much support in their fight to take over the country. And we know that the Haqqani network, which is allied with the Afghan Taliban, has become a good substitute proxy,” he said.

Milam said the argument that the ISI supports hostile groups such as the Haqqani network, the Taliban, and the Lashkar-e-Taiba are generally believed by Western experts to be correct “but evidence for them is all highly-classified and held closely.”

“As for the Leshkar-e-Taiba, it is a reminder that Pakistan still sees India as its primary existential threat and still relies on proxies to keep India off balance.

“A virulently anti-Indian extremist organisation, Leshkar-e-Taiba serves as one proxy. Inside India, in the last several years, it has carried out very serious raids which appear to have had ISI help. (Could they have been rogue ISI units? We don’t know),” he said. —