Top US military official Mike Mullen seemed to sum up Washington’s current relationship with Pakistan when he accused the ISI of supporting the Haqqani network but according to ABC News, what Mullen did not say was that the US had secretly met with a member of the Haqqani network as part of efforts to find a political end to the war in Afghanistan, and that the institution that helped set up the meeting was the same intelligence agency he had condemned – the ISI.
The meeting, according to two current US officials and a former US official, was held in the months before the September 13 attack on the US embassy and NATO’s military headquarters, which US officials have blamed on the Haqqani network. In his congressional testimony September 22, Mullen called the Haqqanis a “veritable arm” of the ISI, but failed to mention that the ISI facilitated the meeting between the US and Ibrahim Haqqani, a son of founder Jalaluddin Haqqani and a major player in the group, according to a senior US official, the ABC News reported.