KABUL: Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders operate “outside the country”. The war on terror “should know no borders.” The international community should address the “root causes of terrorism — wherever they are.”

Afghan officials weave hints and suggestions, but their meaning is becoming increasingly clear: Afghanistan would be more than happy for US forces to attack Taliban and Al Qaeda safe havens in Pakistan.

After the bloodiest year since the 2001 US-led invasion, some analysts say the US and Nato won’t make lasting progress in Afghanistan unless the militants’ ability to command and control the insurgency from across the border is tackled.

The prospects of an American military deployment inside Pakistan, a key US ally in its war on terror, remain slim, because of the outrage it would trigger from the government of President Pervez Musharraf and the wider public.

Last weekend, Pakistan said it would not let American forces hunt militants on its soil after The New York Times said the Bush administration was considering expanding CIA and Special Forces operations into Pakistan’s tribal regions.

But that doesn’t mean Afghan officials won’t lobby for military strikes there anyway — a call likely to enflame already touchy relations with Pakistan just two weeks after the countries’ presidents met in Islamabad and pledged to share intelligence and tighten border controls to quash militancy.

“Terrorism is like a spring. It is better to go to the main source than to fight the water’s flow,” said Gen Mohammad Zahir Azimi, the Defence Ministry spokesman.

The chief of Afghanistan’s intelligence service, Amrullah Saleh, said recently that terrorism’s defeat requires that either Afghanistan’s borders be sealed or “the strategy of the coalition forces toward Pakistan should change.”

“We believe the war on terror should know no borders,” Saleh told Afghanistan’s Tolo TV. “This was the first slogan by the Americans and the US-led international coalition forces. But this war has unfortunately been confined to borders.”

The 2,400km Afghan-Pakistan border has long been a complicating factor in US efforts in Afghanistan.

Top Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders are suspected of running their operations out of tribal areas in Pakistan, where US forces cannot pursue them, and the region is considered a likely hiding place for Osama bin Laden and his top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri.

Pakistan army and Foreign Ministry spokesmen did not respond to calls seeking comment, but the government has repeatedly denied Taliban leaders orchestrate the Afghan insurgency from its soil — and US intelligence reports that Al Qaeda leaders have regrouped there.

Taliban militants in fact pose a growing threat to Pakistan’s own security. Hundreds of people have died, many of them security forces, as Islamist fighters have grabbed control of tracts of Pakistan’s northwestern frontier. In the past three months alone there have been 19 suicide attacks, mostly targeting the army or government.

In the highest-profile attack, Pakistan’s government says it suspects the top Taliban leader in Pakistan, Baitullah Mehsud, was behind the Dec 27 assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

US President George Bush’s top security advisers — including Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice — debated last week whether to expand the authority of the CIA and the military to “conduct far more aggressive covert operations in the tribal areas of Pakistan,” The New York Times reported on Sunday.

Humayun Hamidzada, spokesman for Afghan President Hamid Karzai, said on Tuesday that “wherever the international community carries out operations against terrorism,” it would have a positive effect in Afghanistan.

“I’m not going to comment about the specifics about operations inside Pakistan. All I’m going to say is that we should address the sources, the root causes of terrorism wherever they are,” Hamidzada said, hinting heavily that Afghanistan believes that to be in Pakistan.

Saleh, the intelligence chief, said political pressure, financial incentives and informational exchanges with Pakistan have been ineffective. The Taliban has leadership councils in the Pakistani cities of Quetta, Miranshah and Peshawar, he said.

Karzai has previously alleged that Taliban supreme commander Mullah Omar hides in Quetta, which Pakistan denies.

Saleh said that although the terrorist organisations are not strong enough to resist Pakistan’s army, “the system in Pakistan has no political determination to eliminate these elements and forces.”

Yet American commanders in Afghanistan are quick to praise Pakistan’s role in fighting militancy, saying Pakistani forces have killed or arrested scores of insurgents while taking heavy casualties. The Pakistan army has also improved border coordination and communication with Afghan and Nato officials, US officials say.

But Seth Jones, a Washington-based analyst with the RAND Corp. who follows Afghanistan, said that is not enough.

“If in 2008 the US and Nato more broadly are unable to make progress in undermining the insurgent sanctuary in Pakistan’s border regions, the situation in Afghanistan will not get better,” he said.—AP