Pakistan is helping Afghan Taliban, says Nato report
The Taliban in Afghanistan are being directly assisted by Pakistani security services, according to a secret Nato report seen by the BBC.
The leaked report, derived from thousands of interrogations, claims the Taliban remain defiant and have wide support among the Afghan people.
It alleges that Pakistan knows the locations of senior Taliban leaders.
A BBC correspondent says the report is painful reading for international forces and the Afghan government.
Pakistan has strenuously denied any links with the Taliban on previous occasions.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-16821218
I thought this was old news
= new reply since forum marked as read
them that, for a fraction of the cost. 
I was invited to meet the Swiss-American journalist, Edward Girardet, who discussed his 30 years of reporting in Afghanistan, also described in his book, Killing the Cranes. See http://www.amazon.com/Killing-Cranes-Reporters-Journey-Afghanistan/dp/1603583424 It was a fascinating experience.
According to Girardet, this linkage was certainly the case up to and after 9/11 (after all, some Pakistanis are Pashtun, so it's a no-brainer), that senior US intelligence & military officers knew it but were disregarded or sidelined by the politicos who listened only to those whose ideas fit their own agendas, that relations between al Qaeda and the Taliban were already at the point of fracturing (al Qaeda operatives had long been perceived as "arrogant" and "non-Afghan" - Al Qaeda membership, while not uniquely Arab, was almost generally not "Afghan" - how many Afghans were among the 9/11 hijackers, after all?) and would have imploded in and of themselves had the US politicos and their European allies not launched the war, which united all warring factions against the "outsiders."
I had been paying attention to the situation since the 80s, when I literally could not believe how the US would do something so stupid as to deliberately arm radical religious fundamentalists of any stripe. I could not see that any good would ever come of it -as we all have bitterly seen since. The US-Pakistani relationship, particularly post-Bhutto (the father), has been extremely problematic. I still blame the Brits for partition, which, IMO, should never have happened. We were greatly distracted from politics in that region in the 90s by GOP grandstanding such as the Clinton impeachment crap. But here we are now with the consequences of Brit politics and our own - "special relationship" indeed! Then, to have Idiot Son, Halliburton Man and the rest of the Chickensh** Chickenhawk Warmongers begin a war in Afghanistan to divert attention from their own failures was the height of stupidity, which they later compounded exponentially with the illegal invasion of !raq.
This "secret" has been known openly for years. It's so nice of the Beeb to "share" it. 
