Backlash Secret Pakistan

For ten years, Pakistan has said it's an ally of the West.

Yet in a prison cell in Afghanistan,

a captured suicide bomber alleges that this year,

a Pakistani intelligence officer trained him to kill Western troops.

TRANSLATION: The Pakistani man said that in Afghanistan, there are non-believers.

We are obliged to carry out jihad.

This series tells the hidden story of how,

after 9/1, Pakistan deceived America and the West.

You didn't have to be Sherlock Holmes to put the dots together.

I told the President, Pakistan was playing a double game

and double-dealing us.

We did know extraordinary things -

the Taliban sending out instructions saying that so-and-so

should report for a bomb-making course at a camp in Pakistan.

It's a story of how America struck back.

The Pakistanis wised up to what was going on a little too late.

TRANSLATION: What difference does it make if he's alive or dead?

20, 40, 100 people like Osama die every day.

Told by senior intelligence officials, diplomats

and the Taliban themselves,

it's also the story of how and why Pakistan continues to give secret support to the insurgents.

-TRANSLATION:

-The tanks arrived.

The first passed, then the second, the third. I fired at it.

I frankly remember thinking, "We're dead."

Above all, it is the story of how Pakistan, a supposed ally,

stands accused of causing the deaths of thousands of coalition soldiers

in Afghanistan - deaths that continue to this day.

As long as they have fighters that are sheltered

away from what we can do, we are limited in how much we can get done.

It is the most secret of the many secrets in Pakistan.

The stakes here are huge.

Mystery still surrounds how Osama Bin Laden came to be

hiding in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

The climax of the largest manhunt in history has brought few answers.

But one man has a remarkable story that he believes solves the mystery.

His name is Amrullah Saleh and he was head of Afghan intelligence.

It was a triumphant moment for all of us that Bin Laden was killed

and he was killed in Abbottabad.

It was confirmation of the fact that we believed for so many years.

In 2006, Saleh uncovered evidence that Bin Laden

was living in comfort in a Pakistani town.

In the mountains of northeast Afghanistan,

Afghan intelligence officers captured a Pakistani - Syed Akbar.

They believed he was smuggling weapons to the Taliban.

His interrogation produced an extraordinary claim.

The most revealing and shocking part of Syed Akbar's story is...

he confessed to us that he escorted Bin Laden from one location

to another, and the information we had was suggesting Manshera

as the town where Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda was hiding.

Manshera is in Pakistan, just 12 miles from Abbottabad.

Then came another revelation.

After doing a very thorough, professional investigation,

we found out that he was a serving officer of ISI.

It was an astonishing conclusion.

The ISI - Inter-Services Intelligence -

is the Pakistani intelligence service.

Publicly, Pakistan was one of America's closest allies in the hunt for Al-Qaeda.

Syed Akbar, the alleged Pakistani spy,

is in a high-security prison in Kabul.

He denies helping escort Bin Laden.

But Afghan intelligence believed their information was correct. Their spy chief travelled to Pakistan

with his president, Hamid Karzai.

President Karzai handed the information to Pakistan's leader, Pervez Musharraf.

He banged the table and looked at President Karzai and said,

"Am I president of banana republic?

"If not, then how can you tell me

"Bin Laden is hiding in a settled area of Pakistan?"

I said, "Well, this is the information,

"so you can go and check it."

Now, it happens after so many years,

that Bin Laden was about 12 miles from that location.

Why they should be so blind of the facts of the environment within their own country?

But in public, America and the West clung to their belief

that Pakistan was one of their closest allies.

PRESIDENT BUSH: In Afghanistan, America, our 25 NATO allies

and 15 partner nations are helping the Afghan people

defend their freedom and rebuild their country.

A nation that was once a safe haven for Al-Qaeda

is now a young democracy where people are looking to the future with new hope.

Yet as President Bush spoke, the truth on the ground was different.

British and other NATO troops were under ferocious attack.

After 9/11, the Taliban regime in Afghanistan had been

overthrown for refusing to surrender Bin Laden.

Now, they were back, re-armed and re-organised.

The losses were steadily increasing, very, very serious.

For every soldier killed, four or five were very seriously injured.

Secretly, British spies were uncovering evidence that

Afghanistan's neighbour, Pakistan - and its intelligence service,

the ISI - were driving the Taliban resurgence.

The British ambassador to Afghanistan was receiving the top-secret intelligence.

We did know, I mean, extraordinary things like rotas for people

to go back on training courses to Pakistan.

The Taliban sending out instructions saying that so-and-so should

report for a bomb-making course. And then regular rumours - never substantiated -

that ISI officers were with the insurgents.

The Pakistanis deny all such allegation.

General Athar Abbas speaks for the Pakistani military,

including the ISI.

All the facts on the ground, the evidence,

they all speak contrary to this perception that the state

or the ISI is in support of these groups, is providing

the sanctuaries, providing the material support, et cetera.

Yet one Taliban commander tells a very different story.

He claims that in 2008, he was ordered to go to a camp in Pakistan.

TRANSLATION: It was a big valley by a green mountain

and there were no buildings, only tents.

Speaking for the first time, the commander who fights

under the name Najib alleges that his training was overseen

by officers from Pakistan's intelligence service, the ISI.

He is still fighting Western forces and hid his face.

TRANSLATION: The military would arrive in cars at 8am and leave at 4pm.

They were wearing military uniforms, the uniforms of the ISI.

The Taliban commander claims that the Pakistanis

gave advanced training to thousands of fighters at the camp.

A Taliban cameraman took these exclusive pictures at another training camp in Pakistan.

TRANSLATION: The military commanders gave us

specialised weapons training, both theoretically and practically.

And we were shown how to fire at the enemy from different positions.

That summer, in 2008,

Taliban attacks in Afghanistan reached their highest level yet.

When he left the camp, Commander Najib said he used his new skills to attack an American convoy.

The tanks arrived.

We prepared the ambush.

The first passed, then the second, the third. I fired at it.

The tank caught fire and there was an explosion inside it.

All the people were killed, and we escaped.

In the 1990s, Pakistan had helped create the Taliban,

to prevent Afghanistan falling under the influence of India, Pakistan's enduring enemy.

Support for the Taliban still ran through the highest levels

of Pakistan's intelligence establishment.

Eventually it is they who are going to be on our borders.

We have to co-exist with them, we have to learn to live with them.

Can we afford to have a hostile Afghanistan on our back?

No, we cannot.

The collective wisdom of the nation says

we must continue to have good linkages with the Taliban.

It is in Pakistan's national interest,

and I think everybody knows that it is in Pakistan's national interest.

The Afghan president, Hamid Karzai,

monitored the Taliban resurgence with dismay.

He constantly warned his Western allies that Pakistan was to blame.

Like so many things with Karzai, he exaggerated,

he got it out of proportion, he was paranoid.

But he was right to be worried about Pakistan.

We were wrong to be quite as dismissive as we were about those concerns.

But by 2008, those concerns could no longer be dismissed.

Rising casualties meant that Pakistan's role came under ever-closer scrutiny.

Mary Beth Long was in charge of coordinating America's policy

with that of its NATO allies.

It was clear,

particularly to the soldiers

and to the leaders of the guys on the ground, in the field,

that Pakistani lack of critical involvement

was resulting in deaths of Afghan police in larger numbers than probably anything,

Afghan national army, but Canadians, Dutch, Brits and US,

and the maiming, in particular, of even more.

Yet, for the moment, neither America, nor its allies,

wanted to confront the possibility that Pakistan was double-crossing them.

Somehow, because the Pakistani dimension was too difficult,

too enormous, we just sort of shut it out,

and pretended that by pushing the insurgents around Helmand,

or out of bits of Helmand, that was somehow solving the problem.

But Pakistan's double game was about to become impossible to ignore.

Ahmed Jawad was a shopkeeper who worked opposite the Indian embassy

in the Afghan capital of Kabul.

EXPLOSION

SIRENS BLARE

I remember being in my embassy, hearing the explosion,

feeling the shockwaves,

then seeing the vast pall of black smoke rising over central Kabul.

It was a sophisticated attack, sophisticated because

they had chosen the right time to cause maximum casualties.

A suicide bomber had killed 58 people.

Multiple sources of information, human sources,

technical sources, circumstantial evidence,

all combined making us believe it was the work of Haqqani Network.

Jalaluddin Haqqani was the leader of the most lethal Taliban faction.

The Haqqani group had brought

the tactic of suicide bombs to Afghanistan.

This was one of their attacks on a military base.

In the 1980s, the ISI had funnelled American arms to Haqqani

to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

General Hamid Gul had directed that operation.

Haqqani's a wonderful man. He's a very, very... He is not ambitious.

He doesn't want to rule, he doesn't want to control things.

Those people who came in contact with him,

they have great, high regard for him, for his character qualities,

for his truthfulness,

for his steadfastness, I would say.

It seemed Haqqani's close relationship with the ISI had continued.

Just before the attack on the Indian embassy,

American intelligence agencies intercepted calls between

senior ISI officials and Haqqani fighters planning a major operation.

Mike Waltz saw the intelligence.

Through information and a series of events,

it became pretty clear that the Pakistanis

were behind the Haqqani Network, which was behind the bombing.

A question was being answered of how high in the Pakistani state this went.

And the answer was pretty high. That, to many of us, was something that crossed the line.

What we're talking about is a small cell in the ISI,

never knowingly exposed to Western eyes,

who are in touch with the Taliban, with the Haqqani Network.

It is the most secret of the many secrets in Pakistan.

The bombing of the Indian embassy was a turning point.

From that moment, the NATO allies, above all America,

no longer trusted Pakistan to fight alongside them against the Taliban.

I think finally people had started to run out of steam, frankly.

It became clear that whatever it was we thought we could do, we weren't getting there.

The frustration of our inability to be effective otherwise

turned the administration and the leadership to say,

OK, what other tools do we have in our toolbox?

For the first time,

US special forces were authorised to mount secret raids into Pakistan,

still publicly a valued ally, to hunt down the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.

The first target was near the Pakistani town of Angoor Adda.

I heard it in the morning, on the radio or television or whatever.

There was news that the American forces have crossed the border,

they have gone to a hamlet kind of a place

and they've killed some women and children.

US officials claim the dead were Al-Qaeda fighters.

There was outrage in Pakistan, which continued to deny

any involvement in the bombing of the Indian embassy.

Hypothetically, let's say even that the intelligence had contacts

with the Haqqanis, it does not translate to the ISI helping

the Haqqani group to do the bombing. Those are two different things.

I was very perturbed, because I thought that the Americans have kind of crossed the red line.

The Pakistanis turned off the supply lines

for NATO forces in Afghanistan.

In January 2009, 85% of everything

every NATO soldier ate, drank and shot arrived via Pakistan.

When the Pakistanis turned off the supply lines,

we went onto half rations, just about immediately.

In response, the Americans let it be known there would be no more raids.

The first attempt to fight back against what America

now saw as Pakistan's double game had failed.

A new president would take up the challenge.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: We know the challenges that tomorrow will bring

are the greatest of our lifetime.

President Barack Obama's key advisor on Afghanistan

was a 30-year veteran of the CIA.

The United States and its NATO allies faced catastrophic

defeat in Afghanistan, a war that was being lost,

and being lost at a very rapid pace.

Trying to turn that situation round was an urgent calling.

Now, an atrocity unfolded that proved to the new president

that Pakistan and its institutions were out of control.

I began telling the president-elect that everything pointed back to Pakistan.

It was a defining moment.

GUNFIRE

Ten gunmen rampaged through the Indian city of Mumbai,

killing 170 people.

The gunmen were from a Pakistani militant group, Lashkar-e-Taiba.

This had the signature of Lashkar-e-Taiba all over it,

from the very moment the attacks began,

and once you linked it back to Lashkar-e-Taiba,

you linked it back to the Pakistani intelligence service.

Pakistani intelligence, the ISI, had founded Lashkar-e-Taiba to fight its arch-enemy, India.

But Pakistan claimed it had nothing to do with the Mumbai attack.

I said obviously even we understand

that there were links back with Pakistan,

there's no two things about it.

But then linking it with the government, the ISI?

That is where we disagree, and we say no, there were no links.

The CIA later received intelligence that is said showed the ISI

were directly involved in training the Mumbai gunmen.

President Obama had already decided to act.

The phone rang and a familiar voice came on and said,

"Hi, Bruce, it's Barack. I have an offer for you."

Riedel was asked to investigate the secret Pakistan,

hidden from the West.

He reviewed every scrap of intelligence America had

about Pakistan's involvement with terrorist groups and, above all, the Taliban.

Our own intelligence was unequivocal.

In Afghanistan, we saw an insurgency that was not only getting

passive support from the Pakistani army

and the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI, but getting active support.

Pakistan was raising money, it was training the Taliban,

even sending in experts with the Taliban for attacks on NATO forces.

In Riedel's opinion, the powerful ISI was the key player.

It operates from this headquarters in Islamabad.

The ISI is part of the military. Its agents are mostly soldiers

and it's always commanded by a senior general.

The ISI is a professional intelligence agency.

People don't go blowing up other countries' embassies

or giving guns and money to terrorists

without the authority of the head of the Pakistani army - chief of army staff.

The notion that the ISI is some kind of rogue organisation is a myth.

In March 2009, on board Air Force One,

Bruce Riedel presented his findings to President Obama.

I spoke pretty much nonstop for about 45 minutes

and then we spent an hour, hour-and-a-half, talking about it.

I told the President that Pakistan was double-dealing us

and that the Pakistanis had been double-dealing the United States and its allies

for years and years, and they were probably going to continue to do so.

Even as Bruce Riedel was briefing President Obama,

one American was gaining a remarkable insight

into the relationship between Pakistan and the Taliban.

David Rohde was a senior correspondent for the New York Times.

He had arranged an interview with a Taliban commander,

south of the Afghan capital, Kabul.

We rounded a corner

and there was a car blocking the road in front of us.

We stopped, two gunmen rounded our vehicle,

they've each got a Kalashnikov, they're shouting commands.

And then these two Taliban gunmen jump in the front seat

and they start speeding down the road.

For days, the kidnappers drove across Afghanistan,

evading the US and Afghan forces hunting them.

We were moved into this new car and it struck me

immediately that we started driving down the left-hand side of the road.

David Rohde was in Pakistan, in the border province of North Waziristan.

What shocked and deeply depressed me

was that all along the main highway, every single Pakistani check post

that should have been manned by some sort of Pakistani security force

had been completely abandoned and, instead of Pakistani soldiers,

or militia standing there, it was a young Taliban with a Kalashnikov.

There were Taliban road crews repairing the local roads,

there were Taliban police cruising around,

and I frankly remember thinking, you know, we're dead.

Rohde had been abducted by the Haqqani Network,

the Taliban faction headed by Jalaluddin Haqqani,

the man believed to be behind the bombing of the Indian embassy.

For seven months, Rohde was moved between different safe houses.

Once, he was being driven by Haqqani's son when they encountered a Pakistani army convoy.

Badruddin Haqqani stepped out of the vehicle and he actually waved at the Pakistani soldiers.

He got back into the car and explained

there was a truce between the Taliban and the Pakistani army

and that Taliban vehicles had to pull over and only the driver had to get out, and that was it.

Rohde was eventually imprisoned in the Pakistani town of Miranshah.

When we were held in Miranshah, my guards actually took

bomb-making classes from Uzbek militants that were in this town.

These enormous explosions would go off in the middle of town,

as part of these classes, and there was a local Pakistani

military base and the Pakistanis never came off the base

to investigate what was happening in the town.

He and his translator devised a plan to escape.

One night, their guards fell asleep, and they saw their chance.

I remember whispering to my Afghan colleague and he said,

"Go get the rope."

Together, they climbed over the wall and crept through the sleeping town.

They reached the Pakistani army base in the centre of Miranshah.

The captain in charge quickly had them flown to safety.

Later, Pakistani intelligence, the ISI, arrived to investigate.

Rohde learned the agents did not arrest his Taliban kidnappers from the Haqqani Network.

Instead, they tried to discover how he had escaped.

The Haqqanis took the guards who were asleep that night

when we escaped and handed them to over to the ISI,

to Pakistani military intelligence.

And the ISI then tortured our guards very badly,

and the question the ISI asked him wasn't why did you kidnap

this unarmed American journalist after inviting him to an interview?

Instead, the question the ISI kept asking the guard was,

"Did your family get paid a ransom and you cheated the Haqqanis out of the money?"

US diplomats added David Rohde's experiences to the charge sheet against Pakistan.

We would raise these issues in Pakistan

in very subtle ways and say,

well, you know, how could it be possible that the Haqqanis

are in Miranshah

and there is a military compound just down the road?

And let the Pakistanis basically, you know, stew in this.

Pakistan insisted it WAS battling extremism.

By now, its cities were under attack from Pakistani militant groups who wanted to overthrow the government.

They accused it of going too far to appease the Americans.

In 2009, they launched 60 suicide attacks, killing over 2,000 civilians.

One militant, now in jail in Karachi,

reveals the savagery of the struggle.

He recruited children to be suicide bombers.

TRANSLATION: Young boys are easier to prepare than older men.

We are good friends to them, teach them and then brainwash them.

We also use them to raise funding.

I have sent five boys to the jihad. Three of them were killed.

In spring 2009, the militants, who called themselves the Pakistani Taliban,

had advanced to within 60 miles of the capital, Islamabad.

The Pakistani army launched a ferocious counter-offensive.

We have around 5,000 officers and soldiers who have given their lives.

We have over 9,000 people

who are with serious injuries. Many of them have lost their limbs.

But, to American frustration, the Pakistani military

had not confronted the Afghan Taliban fighters,

who continued to attack the Americans in Afghanistan.

My response was, "Listen, people,

"there's so many people we can take on,

"and we can't take on the whole world.

"Why should Pakistan go after an Afghan Taliban group which is

"not doing anything against Pakistan, just because the US says?"

It doesn't work that way.

By the end of 2009, America feared it might be defeated in Afghanistan.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: I have determined that it is in our vital national interest

to send an additional 30,000 US troops to Afghanistan.

The US administration hoped its determination would persuade

Pakistan to stop giving sanctuary and aid to the Afghan Taliban.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home.

Yet President Obama's deadline meant the Taliban believed victory was in reach.

One Taliban commander, Najib,

alleges that after Obama's announcement, the support he received actually increased.

TRANSLATION: Because Obama put more troops into Afghanistan

and increased the operations here, so Pakistan support for us increased as well.

It increased a great deal.

He described the contents of a single supply truck

he claims the Pakistanis delivered to his group.

500 land mines with remote controls,

20 rocket-propelled grenade launchers...

with 2,000 to 3,000 grenades.

They brought AK-47s, machine guns and rockets.

To this day, the supplies have had a dramatic effect

on his unit's fighting strength.

Eight years ago, we were a group of 30 people, without even ten AK-47s.

Today, we are still 30 people, but we have 30 AK-47s,

ten rocket-propelled grenade launchers and ten machine guns.

I believe in the last eight years, we have grown by about 80%.

NATO began to use its extra forces in a vast campaign

to kill or capture Taliban commanders inside Afghanistan.

Mike Waltz had left the White House to deploy with

US Special Forces on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

He claims the Pakistani military actively aided the Taliban.

When we were operating near a Pakistani military post,

they would often flash signal lights and we could see them

from ridge line to ridge line, then a series of signals and then,

mysteriously, the folks we thought we were going to interact with

were gone.

The Pakistani military was clearly signalling with folks

up in the mountains, which we knew were insurgents.

Yes, yes!

America wanted to take the fight into the Taliban sanctuaries.

During his investigation of Pakistan's double game,

Bruce Riedel had been told by the president to consider every option.

We could invade Pakistan, we could go to war,

we could compel it to change its behaviour.

It sounds ridiculous,

but we'd already invaded two Muslim countries in the last eight years - we could invade another one.

Except that this country has the fastest-growing nuclear arsenal in the world.

Instead, Obama turned to one of America's most secret weapons...

..bombing Pakistan with unmanned drones.

While held captive, the journalist David Rohde experienced the new tactic.

One of the most dangerous days was when there was a drone strike,

just roughly 50 to 100 yards from our house.

It was enormous, it shook the walls of the house we were in.

The drone strike had killed seven militants,

and the guards were furious. I later found out they were saying,

"Let's take him down to the site of the drone attack and behead him and video-tape it in revenge."

In President Obama's first year in office,

there were an estimated 53 drone strikes inside Pakistan, more than the previous five years combined.

At the beginning of the drone operations,

we gave Pakistan advanced tip-off of where we were going

and every single time, the target wasn't there any more.

You didn't have to be Sherlock Holmes to put the dots together.

The problem with the drone attacks is the overwhelming

population of Pakistan thinks they are terrible.

So, just because of that, I think the cost is too heavy,

even if they are accurate.

EXPLOSION

CHANTING: USA out!

Anti-American demonstrators took to the street.

At the start of 2011, they found a new cause.

In mysterious circumstances, an American, Raymond Davis,

killed two men in the Pakistani city of Lahore.

The incident would give a glimpse of a secret war

being fought inside Pakistan by the CIA.

The men were killed during rush hour, on this main road.

The two men died. Davis was arrested.

Off the record, US officials admitted Davis worked for the CIA.

Similarly, Pakistani officials have hinted the men he killed were ISI agents, tracking his movements.

Once, the two spy agencies would've quietly settled this between each other.

Not any more.

I think he should've been put to trial.

But, unfortunately, in the United States,

even the President of the United States went on the TV

and told lies when he said that he had diplomatic immunity. He was not a diplomat!

And I understood that what they wanted to do was make the Raymond Davis issue

so painful for us that we would not want to do that any more.

This is an effort by the ISI to roll back the CIA presence in Pakistan.

Eventually, the Pakistanis released Raymond Davis.

But the incident hinted at a more significant story.

The CIA had secretly flooded Pakistan with hundreds of undercover agents.

America wanted to bypass the ISI in its war against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

The Pakistanis wised up to what was going on a little too late.

While the Raymond Davis controversy raged,

CIA agents were secretly carrying out a major surveillance operation.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Tonight, I can report to the American people -

and to the world - that the United States has conducted

an operation that killed Osama Bin Laden, the leader of Al-Qaeda.

We had located Bin Laden hiding within a compound,

deep inside Pakistan.

The news that every step of the operation had been kept secret

from Pakistan revealed to the world that America had lost all trust in its supposed ally.

To realise that Mr Osama Bin Laden is in my home town,

where I grew up, born, bred, studied, er... I mean, we should have known. We didn't.

It is definitely an intelligence failure,

but whoever selected that place was very smart.

They were living literally under our nose.

The relationship between America and Pakistan now verges on outright hostility.

There is no smoking gun at this point. But, in many ways, this question is now a dark cloud

that hangs over the US-Pakistani relationship.

Was the ISI clueless or complicit? We may never know the answer.

We may have to live in this ambiguity.

Killing Bin Laden was the reason America had attacked Afghanistan and overthrown the Taliban.

But in the ten years since 9/11, that war had taken on a life of its own.

The real military threat

is the Taliban, is a serious insurgency

that's got nothing to do with Bin Laden.

Bin Laden, in operational terms, is utterly, spectacularly irrelevant.

TRANSLATION: What difference does it make if he's alive or dead?

20, 40, 100 people like Osama die every day.

Mullah Azizullah claims Pakistan's support for his insurgent group has not wavered.

We planted land mines on the road.

The convoy was heading towards Nerkh.

This propaganda video, shot earlier this year,

is one of many showing similar operations.

The person who was responsible detonated the mine.

He destroyed the tank and its crew.

This is one place where Mullah Azizullah's claims can be put to the test.

The Afghan province of Paktika borders the Pakistani

sanctuaries of some of the Taliban's most lethal factions.

Forward Operating Base Tillman is right on the border.

It is the home of D Company, of the American 101st Airborne Division.

Most days, the base comes under rocket fire,

sometimes from Afghanistan, sometimes Pakistan.

The soldiers are authorised to fire into Pakistan

if their lives are threatened.

The remoteness of the base and the presence of Taliban fighters

means supplies have to be brought in by air.

D Company's mission was to stop Taliban fighters crossing

the border from their sanctuaries in Pakistan.

They patrolled what they call the infiltration routes every day.

After three or four hours of walking round here,

your legs and arms are shaking, everything hurts,

but you've got to keep going. No-one's going to come get you.

Any time we go near the border, we plan on getting a fight,

almost automatically.

They see us coming, they position themselves, hit us,

then they run back across the border, there's nothing we can do.

Did you notice any difference at all when Osama Bin Laden was killed?

Actually, I haven't. I haven't noticed any difference since he's been killed.

Since Bin Laden's death,

over 250 coalition troops have died in Afghanistan.

The commander of D Company, Captain Edwin Churchill,

says he doesn't get the help he needs from the Pakistani military.

And, that as long as the sanctuaries remain,

there is only so much US forces can achieve.

As long as they have a seemingly endless supply of equipment

and fighters, better sheltered, away from what we can do,

we are limited in how much we can get done.

They're not the only ones getting hurt, wounded and killed in the process.

For the moment, a military resolution

to the conflict in Afghanistan is beyond the reach of either side.

Talking may be the only way to end the war,

and the death of Bin Laden has raised hopes that talks could succeed.

For two decades, Michael Semple worked for the UN in Afghanistan.

He has remarkable contacts with Taliban commanders.

I've heard directly from senior Taliban

that the removal of Osama will make an eventual deal much easier

to achieve, because the US demand for the handover of Osama has been

item one on their agenda for dealing with the Taliban,

which ensured they never got to any item two, three or four.

The most difficult item, the one the Taliban felt unable to deal with,

has just been taken off the agenda.

The man who is currently Britain's top diplomat to Afghanistan

and Pakistan testifies that cautious contacts are being made.

What we have are some channels of communication open, some directly

between the Afghan government

and members of the Taliban leadership, and some others too,

involving some international figures.

It's at a very early and delicate stage,

but I think there are genuine channels of communication.

Those who claim that Pakistan's hidden hand has shaped

the conflict fear the same is true of negotiations.

Last year, in the Pakistani city of Karachi, Mullah Baradar,

the Taliban's second in command, was captured by the ISI.

Secretly, Baradar had made contact with the Afghan government

to discuss a deal that would end the war.

He had done so without the ISI's permission.

The story I heard was that the Pakistanis were able to find

and detain Baradar and their motive in doing so was to bring him back

under control and to send a message that if you want to do a deal,

you have to do it with Pakistan, you can't plough an independent furrow.

Taliban commanders who want negotiations fear retaliation,

not only from more hardline comrades, but also from Pakistan.

Hawa Nooristani is a member of the High Peace Council,

a group set up by the Afghan government to reach out to the Taliban.

In September, its leader was assassinated by a suicide bomber.

Recently, in Kabul, she went to a secret meeting.

Waiting for her was a commander in the Haqqani Network.

To her astonishment,

he said he wanted to talk with the Afghan government.

He said it was vital Pakistan intelligence knew nothing of the meeting.

Well, I've certainly heard stories that pressure of that kind has been put on Taliban leaders.

It's very difficult to know to what extent it is true, but, of course,

like any country, they don't want a neighbour that is anything other than friendly to them.

The ISI can certainly spoil any negotiations process.

So far, there's very little sign that I've seen

that Pakistan is interested in a political deal.

There are claims that the ISI are pressing the Taliban to intensify their military campaign.

In the cells of the Afghan intelligence service

is a prisoner who alleges he was recruited by the ISI

earlier this year and trained to be a suicide bomber.

Even though he is in prison, he still fears for his life.

TRANSLATION: The ISI buy boys from poor families.

The young man alleges that preparations for his mission

were overseen by an ISI officer in a camp in Pakistan.

In the morning, we were taken for training.

The Pakistani man said that in Afghanistan, there are non-believers.

We are obliged to carry out jihad.

After 15 days' training, he was ready to head to Afghanistan.

There were three of us.

We were put into a black vehicle, with black windows.

The police did not stop the car, because it was obviously ISI.

No-one dares stop their cars.

We drove Landi Kotal, towards a mountain.

The driver left us at first light.

We walked the entire night, taking short breaks.

At 8am, someone was waiting for us in the mountains near Jalalabad.

They told me, "Find some police, or Afghan National Army."

"Come for lunch, and you will receive your explosive waistcoat and then go and explode it."

But I didn't want to do it,

because my father is dead and my brothers are all younger than me.

We are all Muslims, and this would have ruined my life in this world and the next.

The young man's claims cannot be verified.

Dozens of suicide attacks have been carried out in 2011,

celebrated in Taliban videos like this one.

In this series, Taliban commanders have revealed the vital role

Pakistan has played and still plays in the battle for Afghanistan.

TRANSLATION: Pakistan plays a significant role.

First, they support us by providing a place to hide.

Secondly, they provide us with weapons.

In the coming months and years, Pakistan's hidden hand will shape

the conflict in Afghanistan and the attempts to bring it to an end.

We cannot disregard our long-term interests, because this is our own area.

The point is, history changes.

In history, you are friends with somebody today

and you are mortal enemies with him tomorrow.

As for Pakistan itself, there are those who fear that the forces unleashed in ten years' of war

may yet come to haunt the whole world.

There is probably no worse nightmare for America, Europe,

the world, in the 21st century than a Pakistan that's out of control,

under the influence of extremist Islamic forces, armed with nuclear weapons.

The stakes here are huge.

What happens in Pakistan

may yet be the most enduring legacy of 9/11

and the hunt for Osama Bin Laden.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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