ISI has vital links with Taliban, says Armitage

Inspite of the of the backdrop of WikiLeaks revelation about ISI's double-game in Afghanistan, former US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage has said the Pakistani spy agency has a relationship with the Taliban.

"When we got tangled down to 2005 to 2008 or so, I think Pakistan and the ISI changed their mind and they wanted to have a vote at the Pashtun table in Afghanistan and they on track (having a relationship with the Taliban)," he told in reply to a question at the popular Charlie Rose show on PBS.

His explanation came weeks after WikiLeaks, a whistle-blower website, made public thousands of classified US military documents on the Afghan war, which also revealed ISI's double game including its Taliban links. However, Armitage told when he was the Deputy Secretary he did not find any evidence of such a relationship between the ISI and Taliban.

"When I was Deputy Secretary, I looked almost every day - from the time that we invaded Afghanistan until I left in February of 2005 - for evidence of any assistance from ISI. We didn't see it. We saw some relationship, but not modern equipment or weapons or anything of that nature. "I thought at that time - first of all, we had dispersed the Taliban to a very high degree - and ISI were thinking that the coalitions were going to prevail," he observed.

Armitage was recently in Pakistan where he met some of the former ISI officials having close links with the Taliban and they, according to him, told him that the US would not succeed in Afghanistan.