Pakistan-based Taliban Pose Global Risk, Thinktank Warns

Taliban groups based in Pakistan could pose a significant international threat and become a leading terrorist group, analysts at a leading thinktank warned today.

"They have the potential to turn a local threat into a transnational threat," Nigel Inkster, senior risk analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies told a London press conference.

Referring to Baitullah Mehsood, described as leader of Taliban in Pakistan, he added: "There is some evidence they were involved with the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and that they have dispatched terrorists to a number of locations including Spain and the United Kingdom."

International terrorism remained a "growth industry" and resurgent groups in Pakistan had earned the "dubious honor" of making the biggest strides during the past year, Inkster said.

Britain's security and intelligence agencies say they are deeply concerned about potential links between individuals in Britain attracted to violence and extreme Islamism and groups based in the tribal areas of South Waziristan.

Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistan president, has blamed Mehsood for the assassination of Bhutto as well as recruiting suicide bombers. A spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban leader denied at the time any involvement in Bhutto's killing.

Inkster was speaking at the launch of the IISS annual Military Survey, which gave a bleak picture of political developments in Iraq and future cooperation between the US and its allies on military operations.

"The Maliki government [in Iraq], remains fractured and insubstantial," said John Chipman, IISS director general. He added: "Individual ministries resemble party or personal fiefdoms with cross-governmental coordination remaining sporadic at best".

The IISS said in its report that the security situation in Iraq had improved because of the "surge" in US troops ordered by President Bush.

However, Chipman warned these advances would be quickly undone if the US reduced the number of its troops in Iraq too quickly. He said US troop levels had to stay high to prevent an increase in Shia military activity, provide security for any provincial elections and keep violence in Kurdistan from increasing.

It was still unclear, Chipman said, whether America's experience in Iraq and Afghanistan had diminished its enthusiasm for "revolutionary" military technologies and the "associated belief that these technologies will change fundamentally the nature of armed conflict".

He added: "If in the past it was the technological and doctrinal gap between the US and its Nato allies that was the center of anxious transatlantic debate, now it is the willpower and capacity gap that is striking."

April's Nato summit in Bucharest, the Romanian capital, was therefore likely to be preoccupied "not only with the question of what the alliance is for, but with the question of whether the alliance can muster the military forces and political commitments to match its expansive strategic vision", Chipman said.

Asked about what could be expected from a new US president - whether Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama or John McCain - Dana Allin, senior fellow at the IISS, replied that among other things there would be a "much more unequivocal renunciation of torture". There would also be a stronger commitment to face up to the issue of climate change, he added.