WASHINGTON, July 30: Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and China — although members of the US-led coalition against terror— are actually sponsoring terrorism, says a report published on Wednesday by a Washington-based think-tank, the CATO Institute.

“Without the active support of the government in Islamabad, it is doubtful whether the Taliban could ever have come to power in Afghanistan,” the report points out.

Pakistani authorities, the report says, helped fund the militia and equip it with military hardware during the mid-1990s.

The author, Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defence and policy studies, at the CATO Institute, says that Afghanistan is not the only place where Pakistani leaders have flirted with terrorist clients. “ Pakistan has also assisted rebel forces in Kashmir even though those groups have committed terrorist acts against civilians. And it should be noted that a disproportionate number of the extremist madrassah schools funded by the Saudis operate in Pakistan,” he observes.

Saudi Arabia, the report says, enlisted in the fight against terrorism only in response to intense pressure from the United States following the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Describing the Saudi cooperation as “ minimal and grudging,” the report says that Riyadh has resisted Washington’s requests to use its bases in Saudi Arabia for military operations against Osama bin Laden’s terrorist facilities in Afghanistan.

Urging the Bush administration to “regard Saudi Arabia as a prime sponsor of international terrorism,” the report says that the kingdom “should have been included for years on the US State Department’s annual list of governments guilty of sponsoring terrorism.”

According to the report, “China’s offences have been milder and more indirect than those of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.”

“Nevertheless, Beijing’s actions raise serious questions about whether its professed commitment to the campaign against international terrorism is genuine. For years, China has exported sensitive military technology to countries that have been sponsors of terrorism. Recipients of such sales include Iran, Iraq and Syria,” says the report.

The report urges China, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia to “prove by their deeds, not just their words, that they are serious about contributing to the campaign against international terrorism.”