Intelligence officials say 100,000 troops will be taken from duties on Afghan border if India begins 'unwanted conflict'

Senior Pakistani intelligence officials have threatened to end military operations against Islamist militants along the country's Afghan border if India deploys troops on their eastern frontier.

In a rare briefing to senior local journalists, intelligence officials said the coming days would be "crucial" and threatened to pull out all the troops committed to the "war on terror" in the event of "an unwanted conflict" with India. "We will not leave a single troop on the western [Afghan] border if we are threatened by India," an official was reported as saying.

Pakistan currently has more than 100,000 soldiers engaged in operations in the semi-autonomous tribal zones where senior international militants connected to al-Qaida, local extremists and a significant proportion of the Taliban's leadership are thought to be based.

The Pakistani operations, largely funded by the United States, are seen by Nato commanders as vital to keep open supply lines to their troops in Afghanistan and to block, or at least hinder, movement by militants across the porous Afghan-Pakistan frontier.

"These statements are aimed at sending a clear message to the US to intervene to defuse the situation, and that if India wants to use these tragic events as a pretext for a border conflict then that will not be tolerated," said Rasul Bakhsh Rais, professor of political science at Lahore University of Management Sciences.

"They are saying that if Pakistan has to choose between fighting India and fighting the militants, then it will fight India."

There are fears of a breakdown of the recent peace process between the nuclear-capable countries. After a bloody attack on India's parliament by militants linked by New Delhi to Pakistan in 2001, troops faced off across the Indian-Pakistan border throughout most of the following year with fierce artillery duels across the shared border of Kashmir.

Washington, concerned about the distraction from efforts to contain Islamist extremism in the region, brokered a peace deal and encouraged a subsequent thaw. The two countries have fought three wars since achieving independence.

Pakistan's government condemned the Mumbai assault as a "barbaric act of terrorism" and denied any involvement by any state institutions.

But the groups that have been named by India as having some responsibility for the attacks, the Pakistan-based

Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad, both have longstanding relationships with Pakistan's security establishment.

Islamabad has also been forced to backtrack on a promise to send the chief of its main intelligence service, the military Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) to India to help with the investigation.

Confusion over the dispatch of Lieutenant General Shuja Pasha to India, announced by Pakistan's prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani last week, has revealed the tension between the military establishment and the civilian government in Pakistan, local analysts say.

A lower ranked official will now travel instead. The mix-up has been blamed on "miscommunication" by Pakistan's president, Asif Ali Zardari.

"The very fact that they wanted to send the head of the ISI shows how much the [civilian government] want to cooperate," said Tariq Fatemi, a former Pakistani ambassador to Washington and Brussels.

"But the decision was taken without due recognition of the ground reality in Pakistan, that is to say without consultation with the military and other political players."

Mohammad Sadiq, a spokesman for the Pakistani government, dismissed reports of tensions as "humbug". "Everything is very much in sync," he said.

Pakistan is making efforts to rally international diplomatic support. Yesterday its foreign minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi spoke by telephone to his counterparts in China, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates as well as to the EU foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, Sadiq said. Pakistani analysts and commentators have insisted that India has been too hasty to blame Islamabad for the attacks. Many in Pakistan believe that New Delhi is using Pakistan as a scapegoat and are calling for an independent international commission of inquiry.

"There was a massive intelligence failure on the part of India," said Rais. "The Pakistani government does not want another conflict. They have two insurgencies to deal with and enough other problems already."

Pakistan's long history of using militants to further foreign policy objectives, initially against Soviet forces occupying Afghanistan in the 1980s and then subsequently in Kashmir, means their current claims of innocence are greeted with scepticism.

In recent years Pakistan has tried to rein in groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba, prime suspects for the Mumbai attack, or Jaish-e-Muhammad, blamed for the 2001 attack on the Indian parliament, but it is unclear how much effort has been made to control the extremists, nor if those efforts have been successful.

A Pakistani official yesterday suggested that one possibility was a "rogue" militant group, pointing out that the ISI itself had been bombed recently by extremists.

'State within a state'

Pakistan's Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), was founded in 1948 by a British army officer seconded to the fledgling country's military forces after independence. The agency became known for involvement in domestic politics, a trend accelerated by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, father of Benazir Bhutto, who set up a political wing. In the 90s, the ISI set up or encouraged a number of jihadi groups as irregular proxies fighting Indian troops in Kashmir. Recent efforts to dismantle or downgrade these groups have proved ineffective, with Pakistan itself suffering regular bombings. The ISI also aided the Taliban in the 90s and is alleged to have contacts with Afghan insurgents. Though frequently called a "state within a state", retired and serving officers insist the ISI is fully integrated into the military chain of command. It is staffed by regular army officers as well as some contractors and civilians, and is the means by which Pakistan's military projects its power internally and overseas.