Islamabad, Pakistan - The U.S. ambassador to Pakistan said in remarks broadcast Saturday that there was evidence linking the Haqqani insurgent network to the Pakistani government, an allegation that could raise tensions in an already strained antiterror alliance between Washington and Islamabad.
The United States and NATO blame the Haqqani network for many of the attacks in Afghanistan, including last week's strike on the U.S. Embassy. The group - affiliated with the Taliban and al-Qaeda - and its army of several thousand fighters is widely assumed to be based just over the Afghan border in Pakistan.
U.S. officials have long suspected links between the Pakistani military and the Haqqani network.
But because they need Pakistani cooperation to beat al-Qaeda and stabilize Afghanistan, they rarely say so publicly and as directly as Ambassador Cameron Munter did in an interview with Radio Pakistan broadcast Saturday.
"The attack that took place in Kabul a few days ago that was the work of the Haqqani network," Munter said during the interview. "And the facts, that we have said in the past, [is] that there are problems, there is evidence linking the Haqqani network to the Pakistan government. This is something that must stop."
Pressed for what evidence the United States had linking Haqqani to the embassy assault, Munter said, "Well, it's just we believe that to be the case."
A Foreign Ministry spokeswoman declined to comment until she heard the interview.
The Pakistani army has resisted attacking North Waziristan and the Haqqanis because it believes the group does not pose a direct threat to the country. The army is engaged in a bloody fight elsewhere in the tribal region against militants who have responded with hundreds of suicide bombs in recent years.
Officers say that making enemies of the Haqqanis now could tip the country into even greater turmoil.
Experts say U.S. plans to withdraw from Afghanistan in 2014 and its efforts to seek peace with the Afghan Taliban make it even less likely that Pakistan will act anytime soon.
The army also believes it will be able to use the group, with which it has ties going back to the U.S.-backed resistance against Soviet rule in Afghanistan, to ensure its archenemy, India, does not gain a foothold there once the American troops leave.
In a statement Friday at a NATO meeting in Spain, Pakistan's army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, appeared to allude to that, saying Pakistan had a "sovereign right to formulate policy in accordance with its national interests and the wishes of the Pakistani people."