WASHINGTON: There is no credible evidence exists of Pakistan’s government involvement in the 2009 attack on CIA operators in Afghanistan, a Washington Post report said citing unnamed US officials.
Declassified US documents made public this week by a nonprofit group made allegations in a memo, written early in 2010 by a US official who was not named, according to the Washington Post report.
The report posed a question about the credibility of the claim made in the document saying that the new version of events has prominent skeptics, including from the US intelligence community which spent many months in investigating the incident.
According to the report, that internal investigation concluded that the plot was cooked up by al-Qaeda and its allies and US officials still maintain that no credible evidence exists of significant involvement by either the Pakistani government or the Haqqanis’.
“One U.S. intelligence official who studied the newly released document described its contents on Thursday as an unverified and uncorroborated report essentially raw intelligence of the kind that routinely lands on the desk of U.S. analysts and diplomats in overseas posts,” the report said.
The declassified report did not say anything about the source of the information, including whether the person was regarded as reliable or how the allegations were eventually assessed.
The report, quoting a US official said that “the document clearly states that it contains unevaluated information”.
He said that there was a general consensus that the December 30 attack was primarily an al-Qaeda plot and did not involve the Haqqani network, as claimed by the declassified document.
That document, referred to as a memo in the Washington Post report, is self-described as an “information report, not finally evaluated”.
“Countering the memo’s claims somewhat are video recordings made by Balawi and Taliban leaders prior to the suicide bombing, as well as statements and essays by al-Qaeda officials describing plans for the attack,” the report said referring to the Jordanian physician who carried out the attack.
“The videos essentially an advance claim of responsibility insist the bombing was intended to exact revenge for earlier CIA drone strikes that killed Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders in the region,” the report said.
The Washington Post report maintained that at time of the attack, “Pakistan was engaged in bitter fighting with the Taliban and had killed hundreds of the group’s fighters that year in a ground offensive, making it unlikely that its government would willingly turn over money to assist what was essentially a Taliban operation”.
A state department spokesman also refused to comment on the declassified document when asked at a press briefing on Thursday, saying they were not State Department documents.
Pakistan on Friday also said allegations made in the document as preposterous.
