Slamming ISI for its "double game" in the war against terrorism, a top US lawmaker has said that while the Pakistani spy agency was cooperating with America on some high-value targets, it was "protecting" militants active in Kashmir.
"ISI continues to be a troubling issue for the
American people and the Congress, in the sense that they always play this double game or they like to play both sides of the fence: while, on one hand, cooperating with us on some high-value targets; and on the other hand, protecting
extremists when it's in their best interests, like for instance in the Kashmir area," Republican Congressman Michael McCaul said.
But "this double game" really came to a head "when we saw the killing of (Osama) bin Laden and we saw where he was living for quite a few years," McCaul, who chaired the Congressional hearing on terror threats from Pakistan, said
Friday.
"It's very troubling to me, because if you look at...there's a diagram up there about the compound, the location, it's less than a mile away, which is half the distance between here and the Washington Monument, to what's the equivalent of Pakistan's West Point Academy," he said.
McCaul noted that the community surrounding bin
Laden's Abbottabad compound included retired military officers and ISI agents.
"This is not a normal house. It was a large compound, very heavily fortified, very suspicious-looking, and in a very sort of military area. It leads me to the question of our relationship with Pakistan," he said.
"Where do we go from here, because in my judgment, it's hard for anybody to believe that they didn't know he (bin Laden) was there. The question is, at what level did the Pakistan government know about this? I believe that either
they're complicit or they're incompetent.
"Either they're complicit with providing material support to the most wanted terrorist by providing him a safe haven, or they're totally incompetent to not know he was there," he said.
The Congressman also called on the Obama
administration to use its influence over Pakistan to prevent the ISI's double game with the US in the war against terrorism.
Responding to the lawmaker's questions, Steve Coll, President and CEO of New America Foundation, a Washington- based eminent think tank, said the circumstantial evidence about the house in Abbottabad raises very disturbing questions about the knowledge that almost certainly must have been present in at least some sections of the Pakistani government about this unusual compound.
"I hope that over time we will discover more about how far up the chain of command in Pakistan such knowledge might have gone," he said.