Source: SMH

WASHINGTON: The CIA has funnelled hundreds of millions of dollars to Pakistan's intelligence service since the September 11 attacks, accounting for as much as one-third of the agency's budget, US officials say.

The Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) also has collected tens of millions of dollars through a classified CIA program that pays for the capture or killing of wanted militants, a clandestine counterpart to the rewards publicly offered by the State Department.

The payments have triggered intense debate in the US Government because of long-standing suspicions that the ISI continues to help Taliban extremists who undermine US efforts in Afghanistan and provide sanctuary to al-Qaeda members in Pakistan.

But US officials have continued the funding because the ISI's assistance is considered crucial. Almost every major terrorist plot this decade has originated in Pakistan's tribal belt, where ISI informants are a primary source of intelligence.

The payments to Pakistan were authorised under a covert program approved by President George Bush and continued under Barack Obama. The CIA declined to comment on the agency's financial ties to the ISI.

US officials often tout US-Pakistani intelligence co-operation. But the extent of the financial underpinnings of that relationship have never been publicly disclosed. The CIA payments are a hidden stream in a much broader financial flow; the US has given Pakistan more than $US15 billion ($16 billion) over the past eight years in military and civilian aid.

The ISI has used the covert CIA money for a range of purposes, including the construction of a new headquarters in the capital, Islamabad.

''What we didn't want to happen was for this group of generals in power at the time to just start putting it in their pockets or building mansions in Dubai,'' said a former CIA operative who served in Islamabad.

The scale of the payments shows the extent to which money has fuelled an espionage alliance credited with damaging al-Qaeda but also plagued by distrust.

The complexity of the relationship is reflected in other ways. Officials said the CIA has routinely brought ISI operatives to a secret training facility in North Carolina, even as US intelligence analysts try to assess whether segments of the ISI have worked against the US.

A report distributed in late 2007 by the National Intelligence Council was characteristically conflicted on the question of ISI ties to the Taliban, a relationship that traces back to Pakistan's support for Islamic militants fighting to oust the Soviets from Afghanistan.

The report was inconclusive, a former US national security official said. ''You've got no smoking gun from command and control that links them to the activities of the insurgents.''