ISLAMABAD, Sept 14: Pakistan on Sunday dismissed as baseless a US intelligence report claiming that Pakistan helped Al Qaeda members launch their operations in Afghanistan in the 1990s.

“This is a baseless report. The document itself says the information is raw. It does not seem to be founded on hard evidence,” a senior foreign ministry official told AFP.

The US intelligence documents made public in Washington claimed Pakistan helped Al Qaeda members launch their operations in Afghanistan in the 1990s and secretly ran a major training camp used by Osama bin Laden’s network.

The Pakistani foreign ministry official said Islamabad had not yet officially received the report, but said its “contents seem to be absurd and baseless.”

Officials say Al Qaeda surfaced during the US-backed jihad against the 1979-89 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

“They funded it, financed it and provided equipment and training to create a force of Mujahideen to fight the Russians,” a close aide to former ISI chief Gen Akhtar Abdul Rehman, said.

An analyst of Afghan affairs Maulana Tahir Ashrafi, who had been involved in negotiations with former Taliban leaders, also described the report as “hilarious.”

“When the jihad was on, US airlines used to offer 50 per cent rebate to Arabs who would volunteer to participate in the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan,” Maulana Ashrafi told AFP.

Maulana Ashrafi, who is chairman of the Pakistan Ulema Council and a regional government adviser, added: “The US military strategists were at that time living in Pakistan. They provided weapons and selected the location of training camps in Afghanistan.”

He claimed that Osama bin Laden was once the US military’s “most favourite” child, who they held up as an inspirational hero to Muslim youth.

He described as incorrect allegations that Pakistan set up camps to pamper the Taliban. “The reality is, and it is a matter of record, that terrorists wanted by Pakistan were taking refuge in the Taliban-run camps in Afghanistan.

“If we had any influence on Taliban we would have secured the extradition of the wanted men who were involved in sectarian violence here in 1990s,” he said.

He said the American created “a huge army of Mujahideen by recruiting people from Pakistan and the Middle East and suddenly abandoned them.

“If Pakistan had played any role in Afghanistan it was on the instruction of Americans, it is a historic fact.”

The documents, produced by the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) in 2001 and declassified last week, also indicate that Afghan commander Ahmad Shah Masood may have been killed two days before the Sept 11 attacks because he knew about Osama’s plan and “began to warn the West.”

In its secret dispatches the DIA paints a complex picture of factional rivalry, in which Pakistan tried to use the Taliban and Al Qaeda to promote its influence in war-torn Afghanistan — only to lose control over both of them.