LONDON, June 2: Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) chief Brigadier Ashkraf Afridi is directing operations of Afghanistan's fundamentalist Taliban from Kabul, The Sunday Telegraph reported yesterday.

The paper said Afridi has ordered the movement of huge stockpile of arms and ammunition from military dumps in Peshawar and Islamabad to shore up crumbling Taliban defences.

``There is a prospect of renewed infusion of regular Pakistan armymen to join Taliban's frontline, if the risk of serious military reversal increases,'' it said.

In a startling corroboration, the paper said regular Pakistani armymen disguised as tribal Pushtoon militiamen had arrived in Taliban's main camp south-west of Kabul last July and had led and directed the assault on Kabul.

The paper said the situation at present looked precarious for the purist Islamic rulers of Kabul after their near rout at the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharief with their ``big columns getting trapped in Salang Pass forcing large numbers to surrender.''

There have been earlier media reports also saying that regular Pakistan artillery soldiers had manned the heavy guns and tanks to lead the Taliban assault on Kabul. ``For Pakistan the stakes are very high in Afghanistan,'' the paper said, claiming the ISI wanted to dominate Afghanistan and had found Taliban as the most pliable of the otherwise fiercely independent Afghan organisations through which it wants to capture and control vital trade routes to the gas, petroleum and mineral rich central Asia.

``The stakes have been upped so much that the very future of ISI now depends on its ability to control Afghanistan which would also give it control of a vital gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan being built by an American company, UNCOL,'' it said. The paper said while the Nawaz Sharief Government may deny any links with Taliban, ``but as always in Pakistan, what the civilians do or think will not have prevented the army top brass from playing an active role in Afghanistan.''

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.