secret US military report says the Taliban, backed by Pakistan, are preparing to retake control of Afghanistan after Nato-led forces withdraw from the country.

 

 The report, The State of the Taliban 2012, is the latest of a series drawn up by aUS special operations taskforce on the basis of interrogations with 4,000 suspected Taliban and al-Qaida detainees. Its conclusions, that the Taliban's strength and morale are largely intact despite the Nato military surge, and that significant numbers of Afghan government soldiers are defecting to them, are in stark contrast to Nato's far more bullish official line, that the insurgent movement has been severely damaged and demoralised. The report, leaked to the BBC and The Times, also portrays the Taliban as being under the thumb of Pakistan's powerful security agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), but resenting that control. The BBC quotes the report as saying: "Pakistan's manipulation of the Taliban senior leadership continues unabated," and says Pakistan is aware of the locations of senior Taliban leaders, some of whom live close to the ISI's headquarters, in Rawalpindi. The report also quotes a senior al-Qaida detainee as saying: "Pakistan knows everything. They control everything. I can't [expletive] on a tree in Kunar without them watching."He added: "The Taliban are not Islam. The Taliban are Islamabad." A Pakistani government official rejected the report's findings, telling Reuters: "This is frivolous, to put it mildly. We are committed to non-interference in Afghanistan." Lieutenant Colonel Jimmie Cummings, a spokesman for the Nato-led International Security Assistance Force (Isaf), confirmed the document's existence but denied that it was a strategic study of operations. "The classified document in question is a compilation of Taliban detainee opinions," he said. "It's not an analysis, nor is it meant to be considered an analysis." The report is the latest of a series aimed at providing an assessment of the insurgency on the basis of detainee interrogations, mostly at the Nato base at Bagram. The first, the State of the Taliban 2009, was drawn up by US academics attached to a special forces unit called Task Force 373, charged with hunting down Taliban commanders. That report was influential in convincing the British government at the time that a peace deal could be done with the Taliban. Sherard Cowper-Coles, the former UK special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, said of the document at the time: "It paints a picture of the Taliban believing that they are winning in the long war, in the long game, though they suffer tactical reverses. "It shows that many of them are fed up with fighting; that some of them have suffered very painful losses. And it shows their real objection is to foreigners in their land, whether those foreigners come from Kansas or Karachi or Cairo. They are fighting as nationalists, and it does show that a deal could be done – but it doesn't show that a deal will be done."