Afghan Taliban deny they’re ready to talk peace

“This is old wine in an even older bottle. I don’t think these claims are new,” she said.

“So I think that I can just disregard this as potentially a strategic leak or otherwise.”

NATO officials cautioned that the report was a summary of interrogations and was not based on an intelligence analysis.

“There is an expression in the report that they are basing themselves on the support from Pakistan,” said Brig. Gen. Carsten Jacobson, a spokesman for the U.S.-led military coalition in Afghanistan.

Jacobson said the report was a “compilation of investigations, or interrogations straight after detainment, so we can not really put that high a value on what they are saying. They are talking (about) their perception of the campaign, what they believe about how the campaign is going, and what they want us to believe about how their campaign is going.”

He said most of the captured fighters think that “they are still having a successful role” on the ground but that perception was wrong.

“The insurgency is clearly on the back foot. We have been pressurizing them over the summer, we have taken vast amounts of land out of their hands and we have detained a high number” of militants, Jacobson said.

In Brussels, a senior NATO official also said the alliance has no doubt that insurgents are infiltrating the Afghan security forces. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of standing rules.

The assertion came after a string of killings of foreign forces by their Afghan counterparts.

U.S. defense officials told the U.S. House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday that the number of insider attacks in Afghanistan has dramatically increased. Seventy-five percent of the more than 40 incidents since 2007 happened in the past two years. Most of the attackers acted out of personal motivation, and were not directed by insurgents.

The attacks have killed 70 coalition troops and wounded another 110.

In the latest such incident, an Afghan soldier shot and killed a NATO service member in southern Afghanistan late Tuesday, although the circumstances were unclear. The U.S.-led military coalition said it was an attack, while an Afghan commander called it an accident.

• Associated Press writers Patrick Quinn in Kabul and Slobodan Lekic in Brussels contributed to this report.

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