Pakistan must co-operate with NATO, Peter MacKay says

Pakistan can't co-operate with the Taliban if the country's government expects Canada and other allies to continue working in the region, Defence Minister Peter MacKay said Wednesday.

Addressing a leaked NATO report that says the alliance believes Pakistan is still supporting the Taliban, MacKay dismissed the part of the report that said the insurgents' morale is high.

He said it's not a new concern for Canada that Pakistan's intelligence service, the ISI, is working with the Taliban.

"We’ve always been very clear in our messaging and in our insistence that Pakistan not co-operate at any level with the Taliban. And that has been a frustrated effort," MacKay said.

"If they are a reliable ally, and if they are a country that wants to see the United States, Canada, Great Britain and other NATO allies continue to work in the region and to bring about peace and security throughout the region, then their co-operation is required and in fact is demanded."

MacKay is spending Thursday and Friday in Brussels at a meeting of NATO defence ministers.

The report was released the same day U.S. Defence Secretary Leon Panetta reportedly said American troops would make the transition from a combat role into training by the end of 2013. He spoke to reporters on the way to Brussels.

On Thursday, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said the alliance should stand by its previously agreed plan to wind down operations in Afghanistan by the end of 2014, with any changes to the schedule co-ordinated with allies, Reuters reported.

But he said the timeline agreed to by NATO allies in 2010 foresaw handing over the last area of Afghanistan to Afghan forces by the middle of 2013.

Pakistan dismisses claims

Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar told reporters in Kabul, where she was on a one-day visit, that the claims of Pakistan support for the Taliban were not new and could be disregarded.

"This is old wine in an even older bottle. I don't think these claims are new. These claims have been made for many, many years," she said.

Just-retired Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Admiral Mike Mullen last year called the Taliban-affiliated Haqqani insurgent network, based in safe havens across the border in Pakistan, a "veritable arm" of the Pakistani intelligence agency. Mullen also alleged that Pakistani intelligence supported militants who last September mounted a 20-hour rocket attack on the U.S. Embassy and NATO headquarters in Kabul.

In Brussels, a NATO official cautioned that the document was not based on any intelligence analysis of the situation on the ground, but is a summary of thousands of interrogation reports.

The classified report has not been made public, but its contents were summarized to The Associated Press.

Earlier this week, the man who commands the Canadian army said he wasn't sure the international community would pay what Afghanistan's defence minister estimates it will cost to equip the Afghan National Security Forces.

Current estimates from the country's defence minister, Abdul Rahim Wardak, has the Afghans spending more than $6.2 billion a year to pay and equip their forces. That's in a country where the budget of the entire federal treasury is $4 billion, much of that foreign aid.

Lt.-Gen. Peter Devlin, who commanded NATO's multinational brigade in Kabul in 2003-04, told The Canadian Press it will be hard to explain the threat of an unstable Afghanistan to people in the western countries who have been paying for the military.