HONG KONG, March 10: Pakistan is failing to cooperate with the United States in its battle to crush the Taliban despite Washington's restraint over Islamabad's nuclear proliferation scandal, US Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said in a report released on Wednesday.

Mr Wolfowitz presented a blunt assessment of its key war on terror ally in an interview with the weekly Asian magazine Far Eastern Economic Review, saying Pakistan was turning a blind eye to Taliban activity during a renewed drive to hunt down Muslim extremists.

He warned that Islamabad, once the main backer of the hardline Taliban regime in Afghanistan, was testing Washington's patience as it prepared to stiffen its demands on President Pervez Musharraf.

"The military is ... cooperating with (the United States in getting) Al-Qaeda, but it's not cooperating with (getting) the Taliban," Mr Wolfowitz said in the interview.

"There is a widespread kind of belief in Pakistan that the Americans want Al-Qaeda, but Pakistan continues to turn a blind eye to support the Taliban," he said. "That clearly is now an issue if you want to do (Afghan) elections in June. You need to wrap up some of these Taliban people, which is quite separate from Al-Qaeda."

Mr Wolfowitz said Washington was likely to increase its demands on Islamabad in return for downplaying a scandal when Pakistani physicist Abdul Qadeer Khan was pardoned after admitting selling nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya, and North Korea.

"We feel it gives us more leverage. I think it may give Musharraf a somewhat stronger hand in Pakistan. He's got an act to clean up. "The international community is prepared to accept his pardon of A.Q. Khan for all he's done, but it's clearly a kind of IOU that, in return for that, there has to be a full accounting of everything that's happened."

The United States has so far been denied official permission to deploy its troops on Pakistani soil. Despite his harsh words, Mr Wolfowitz stressed Washington's dependence on Pakistan, which became a major player in the US-led war on terror in the immediate aftermath of the Sept 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

Pakistan, which is struggling to contain extremist violence within its own borders, has repeatedly insisted it is doing its best to hunt down Al-Qaeda and Taliban cells operating in the mountainous border region with Afghanistan. -AFP