US suspects ISI behind Kabul Embassy attack: report

Washington: US suspects that Pakistan's powerful spy agency ISI could be behind the attack on its Embassy in Kabul this week and is looking for direct evidence in this regard.

A senior US defence official said that given the ISI's history of supporting and sheltering the Haqqanis, it was "almost reflexive" to see if the spy agency had any role in the latest Kabul violence that left 27 people dead.

"The possibility of ISI involvement was already being considered within hours of the attack's conclusion when President Barack Obama's National Security Council met Wednesday, said a US official," The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday.

The American suspicions are being partly fuelled by growing concerns that deteriorating bilateral relations, and the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, may be pushing elements of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency to more closely embrace the Haqqani network, the Taliban faction blamed for this week's violence and a spate of attacks in and around Kabul.

Neither the ISI nor the Pakistani military, of which the spy agency is part, immediately responded to the US suspicions, the WSJ said, adding that Pakistani government officials dismissed the suspicions as insulting and unfair.

Top US officials, including Defence Secretary Leon Panetta, have already blamed the violence in Kabul on the Haqqani network, an Afghan insurgent faction whose history is intertwined with the ISI. The Pakistani spy agency has aided Haqqani network attacks in Kabul in past years, officials say.

The US has warned the Pakistanis of stronger action if the group wasn't reined in.

Afghan officials say mobile phones found on the slain attackers in this week's commando-style raid in Kabul indicate they were in contact with people from "outside Afghanistan" a typical Afghan way of indirectly pointing to Pakistan.

Even so, US and Afghan officials have stopped short of publicly linking the attack to the ISI, as they did after past attacks in Kabul, such as the 2008 and 2009 bombings of the Indian Embassy in Kabul.

In those and other cases, US officials said that communications intercepts and other intelligence directly linked the ISI to the attacks. Yet it took months to reach that conclusion and publicise it.

What is different this time is the speed with which some US officials publicly said they were exploring ISI links, a sign of the growing frustration of US officials who in recent months have become more public in their finger-pointing at Pakistan for its coordination with Islamist militant groups.

According to the daily, a senior US defence official said there is currently no "actionable intelligence" linking Pakistan's spy service to this week's attack.

"But we're looking for it closely," the defence official said shortly after the violence ended," the official was quoted as saying.

"That illustrates the deep vein of mistrust now running through the relationship between Washington and Islamabad," the officials said.

"The level of patience has just gone out the window," Seth Jones, a political scientist at the Rand Corp, who has spent much of the past two years working with the US military in Afghanistan, was quoted as saying.

"People aren't keeping it inside anymore and containing it in a circle that, for a while, was just private," he said.

"US officials say they are looking for evidence that directly links elements of Pakistan's powerful spy agency to this week's assault on the US Embassy and coalition headquarters in Kabul, a sign of just how rancorous relations have become between the two allies in the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban," the daily said.

A direct attack on an American embassy "isn't something we can treat as business-as-usual," said the US defense official.

Even if no ISI link is found, the Pakistani relationship with the Haqqanis is "long past unacceptable," the official said.

"Missteps by both the US and Pakistan this year have led to a sharp deterioration in relations, which may also be prompting Islamabad to more closely embrace militant groups from which it has sought to publicly distance itself in recent years, according to US officials and Mr Jones of Rand," the daily said.

'US no longer a superpower'

Washington: Two out of three Americans taking part in a poll do not believe that the United States is the sole remaining superpower in the world.

The poll, released by Time magazine and the Aspen Institute, also indicates that Americans want their leaders to focus more on domestic challenges and less on foreign issues, The Christian Science Monitor reports.

Over two-thirds of Americans consider the last 10 years to have been a decade of decline for America. Three-fourths of American people say economic weakness poses a greater danger than national security threats, the report said.

In May, a Pew Research Centre poll found that majorities in every partisan group of the population including, for the first time in the decade of 9/11, conservative Republicans agreed with the statement that the US ‘should pay less attention to problems overseas and concentrate on problems here at home.

Last month, President Obama declared, in announcing his plans for a troop drawdown in Afghanistan said, “America, it is time to focus on national-building here at home.”

'South China Sea disputes could cause war in Asia’

Canberra: Risks are growing that incidents at sea involving China could lead to war in Asia, potentially drawing in the United States and other powers, an Australian think tank warned on Tuesday.

The Lowy Institute said in a report that the Chinese military's risk-taking behaviour in the South and East China Seas, along with the country's resource needs and greater assertiveness, have raised the chances of an armed conflict.

"The sea lanes of Indo-Pacific Asia are becoming more crowded, contested and vulnerable to armed strife. Naval and Air Forces are being strengthened amid shifting balances of economic strategic weight," report authors Rory Medcalf and Raoul Heinrichs wrote.

"China's frictions with the United States, Japan and India are likely to persist and intensify. As the number and tempo of incidents increases, so does the likelihood that an episode will escalate to armed confrontation, diplomatic crisis or possibly even conflict," the report said.

The study on major powers and maritime security in Indo-Pacific Asia was published as China prepares to unveil its first aircraft carrier, perhaps this week, a development that has added to worries in the region about China's military expansion and reach.

Earlier this month, China sent its biggest civilian patrol ship to the South China Sea. That rattled the Philippines, which makes competing claims to some waters thought to hold vast oil and gas reserves.

On Monday, the US Senate passed a resolution that deplored China's use of force against Vietnamese and Philippine ships in South China Sea.

Senator Jim Webb, chair of an east Asian and Pacific affairs subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said "a growing number of nations around the South China Sea are now voicing serious concerns about China's pattern of intimidation."

"Danger zone"

Ian Storey, an expert on maritime security in Asia, said the report was a "balanced and credible assessment" of the risks of a military clash in the South China Sea as "competition over territorial claims, maritime boundaries and natural resources heats up, and as China adopts more aggressive tactics."

"The complete absence of confidence-building measures and conflict prevention mechanisms between the various claimants suggests that it is only a question of time before an incident at sea escalates into a more serious confrontation, with worrying implications for regional stability," said Storey, a security analyst at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore.

Medcalf and Heinrichs said more maritime patrols and intrusive surveillance, nationalism and resources disputes will together make it harder to manage arguments over maritime sovereignty.

"All of these factors are making Asia a danger zone for incidents at sea: close-range encounters involving vessels and aircraft from competing powers, typically in sensitive or contested zones," the report said.

The report detailed tensions between Beijing and Tokyo, which stemmed from an April 2010 Chinese naval exercise near the Japanese islands of Okinawa and were exacerbated by Japan's arrest of a Chinese fisherman whose trawler had rammed a coastguard vessel.

Those incidents provoked a diplomatic crisis during which China cut its exports of crucial rare earth minerals to Japan, the United States' closest ally in the region.

Despite initial signs of warmer bilateral ties following the March tsunami and nuclear crisis in Japan, a long-running dispute over a chain of isles which are close to potentially significant oil and gas reserves.

"Helicopter buzzing incidents have continued, with Japan deploring as especially insensitive an instance that occurred in the weeks following the March disaster," the report said.

It said Beijing has caused concern in Southeast Asia over its "core interest" claim on the South China Sea and in Australia about China's possible future security behaviour, while the emergence of competition between India and China at sea is "only a matter of time”.

Medcalf and Heinrichs said new efforts were needed to build regional confidence and to involve China in a continued military dialogue with the United States and Japan.

They also said maritime security hotlines were needed between the US and China, and Japan and China, to allow real-time responses to any incidents.