ISLAMABAD – Pakistan on Friday dismissed the declassified US government document – obtained by an independent research group – claimed that a Pakistani intelligence officer funded the deadly attack on Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) personnel in eastern Afghanistan conducted by Haqqani network in December 2009.
“Allegations in the media on Pakistan’s involvement with Haqqani network (HQN) are preposterous,” Foreign Office (FO) spokesman Nafees Zakaria said, in a statement issued on Friday. He further said that in fact, Pakistan was shocked and deeply saddened when precious American lives were lost at the Chapman facility in 2009 in an unfortunate attack that was later claimed by the Taliban in a publicly available video, featuring the suicide bomber with the leader of the Taliban.
Zakaria also said that over the past years, Pakistan has launched a series of army operations in different areas of Pakistan which severely damaged and weakened the Taliban and other militant and terrorist organisations. “We wish to remind that Pakistan is among the biggest victims of terrorism, having lost tens of thousands of innocent lives, including over five thousand valiant personnel of law enforcement agencies, and economic losses to the tune of a hundred billion dollars.”
“Pakistan is determined to eradicate the scourge of terrorism and has taken action against all terrorist elements, without discrimination,” the FO spoklesman said. Earlier, the heavily redacted document obtained by the National Security Archive, a nongovernmental research institute at George Washington University, claims that Pakistan’s spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, and the Haqqani network were involved in facilitating the attack.
The December 30, 2009 attack on Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost in eastern Afghanistan, carried out by a Jordanian doctor who was working as a double agent for al Qaeda and the Taliban, was one of the most devastating in the history of the Central Intelligence Agency, killing seven and wounding six. The document, dated February 2010, claimed an unidentified ‘Pakistani ISI officer’ provided $200,000 to Haqqani and another man to enable the attack on Chapman.
An Afghan border commander in Khost was promised $100,000 of the money to facilitate the attack but died in the bombing, it said. Because the document is heavily censored, it is not clear whether it represents an intelligence agency consensus or fragmentary reporting. One line, which has been crossed out, says: “This is an information report, not finally evaluated intelligence.”
The declassified U.S. government document can be found here: (https://nsarchive.files.wordpress.com/2016/04/hqn9.pdf)
