Pakistan denies assassination role

ISLAMABAD – Pakistan’s foreign ministry on Sunday rejected claims from Kabul that Pakistan’s spy agency was involved in the assassination of Afghanistan’s chief negotiator with the Taliban.

Afghan and U.S. officials have pressured Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency to sever its ties with the Haqqani network, a wing of the Taliban regarded by Washington as the most dangerous security threat to U.S., NATO and Afghan forces in Afghanistan.

Last month, Adm. Mike Mullen, who has just retired as the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Senate hearing that the ISI helped Haqqani militants carry out a 20-hour siege on the U.S. Embassy in Kabul on Sept. 13, as well as a truck bombing in Wardak province that injured more than 70 U.S. soldiers. Mullen called the Haqqani network “a veritable arm of the ISI.”

Afghan officials, meanwhile, have claimed that the ISI played a role in the Sept. 20 assassination of former Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani, who was tapped by Afghan President Hamid Karzai to lead negotiation efforts with the Taliban to end the country’s 10-year conflict.

Rabbani’s murder dealt a severe blow to efforts by the U.S. and Afghanistan to find a political solution to the insurgency through reconciliation. Over the weekend, Afghan Interior Minister Bismullah Khan Mohammadi told the Afghan parliament that the ISI was involved in Rabbani’s assassination.

On Sunday, Pakistani officials dismissed those allegations as “baseless.”

“The Afghan interior minister’s statement is all the more regrettable, as Pakistani Prime Minister Yusaf Raza Gilani had himself offered cooperation in the investigation,” the Pakistani Foreign Ministry said in a prepared a statement. “There is a need to take stock of the direction taken by Afghan intelligence and security agencies.”