The Taliban trail

LA Times:

The guerrillas followed a dirt road from the Pakistan border through a valley surrounded by low, grassy mountains to their target: an Afghan police post.

Not long after sunset, they opened fire from several sides. For almost four hours, scores of suspected Taliban fighters outgunned the lightly armed Afghan border police, and almost overran their camp.

Then, as quickly as it started, the fight ended. The militants picked up their dead and wounded and fled back into sanctuaries, three miles away, in one of the loosely governed tribal areas of Pakistan.

"A hundred armed Taliban men passed through the Pakistani border with their equipment, and with their rocket-propelled grenade launchers," said Qasim Khail, commander of the Afghan border police's 2nd Brigade, which guards the post here. "And they retreated the same way. There are only two escape routes out of here, and both of them end at a Pakistani border post."

Confidential documents obtained by The Times show that for at least two years, U.S. military intelligence agencies have warned American commanders that Taliban militants were arming and training in Pakistan, then slipping into Afghanistan with the help of Pakistani border control officers.

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Like many Afghans, Khail believes that despite Musharraf's persistent denials, his country's Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, still supports the Taliban and at least some of its allies. The intelligence documents show that the U.S. military shared this suspicion as recently as the start of this year.

Doubts about Pakistan's denials are reminiscent of the 1990s, when Islamabad contended that the ISI did not help found, train and arm the Taliban, though Pakistani heavy weapons and military officers were found among Taliban units.

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In October, Khail said, Taliban fighters who attacked a border post took the body of an Afghan border policeman back to Pakistan, where they mutilated it and paraded it around a village. Khail soon got a phone call from a Pakistani police officer, who told the Afghan commander that he could pick up the Afghan's remains at the border in exchange for the body of a Taliban militant. Among the three Pakistanis attending the exchange was a man in a Pakistani police uniform, Khail said.

"The Pakistani police know everything about the border problems," he said. "The Pakistanis are giving them the weapons, and they are arranging the Taliban attacks. They are training them and they give them food. There are hundreds of training camps there in Pakistan."

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There is much more.

The big question is how much longer can we ignore that Pakistan is the source of most of the terror in not only Afghanistan, but the world? The evidence keeps mounting from attacks in London to plots against the US that all have their sanctuary in Pakistan. It is also clear that the Pakistani government is either complicit in these sanctuaries continued existence are that it is too incompetent to destroy them. Which ever it is, the situation should no longer be tolerated.