Islamabad: After the US has decided to suspend military aid to Islamabad, Pakistan has stopped sharing of key intelligence with the US. Pakistan was no longer sharing information collected from sources on the ground in the border region with Afghanistan, Pakistani officials said. “The human intelligence involves a range of sources, from suspects coming from Afghanistan who are caught by our forces to our own intelligence-gathering mechanisms. All that is on hold for now,” said an official.
“The US drones which fly over the Pakistani side of the border at times collect intelligence information. But no drone can do the 100 per cent job.” The move follows the decision by US President Donald Trump to suspend around $2bn of annual military aid to Pakistan unless it does more to tackle Islamist militants in the Afghan border region.
Washington has long been frustrated by what it sees as duplicity by Islamabad, which it says accepts billions of dollars of US aid to help it eliminate militancy while offering a haven to some extremist groups.
Khurram Dastgir Khan, Pakistan’s defence minister, said some intelligence-sharing with the US would be halted. But it had been unclear until now what that would entail. Khan said Islamabad was still considering the more radical option of preventing US forces using Pakistan as a land route to Afghanistan. Political leaders said another option would be to increase the fee charged to use it to compensate for the lost aid. “If the Americans choose to stop our aid, we can only raise the cost of the passage,” an MP from Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz party said.
