WASHINGTON, Feb 14: Two senior members of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee have alleged that elements within the Pakistan government were sheltering Taliban fighters along the Pakistan-Afghan border and undermining the stability of Afghanistan.

The senators, Richard G. Lugar, Republican of Indiana, and Joseph R. Biden Jr, Democrat of Delaware, said they did not believe that President Pervez Musharraf was “involved in these activities,” but there was evidence that elements of the Inter-Services Intelligence agency might be helping members of the Taliban and Al Qaeda operate along the border.

According to the New York Times, the senators also raised concerns that Iran was assisting the warlord, Ismail Khan, in western Afghanistan.

“(The) ISI is once again either turning a blind eye to or cooperating with” Pakhtoon groups opposed to the Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai, said Mr Biden, the committee’s ranking Democrat, during a hearing on the reconstruction of Afghanistan earlier this week.

Mr Lugar, the committee chairman, said elements of Pakistan’s intelligence service, which supported the Taliban in the 1990s, appeared to be trying to gain influence in Afghanistan by allowing Taliban fighters to infiltrate across the border, where they had been attacking Afghan and American soldiers.

“This is international politics impinging on a small country,” Mr Lugar said.

Responding to the senators’ concerns, two senior administration officials said they thought the situation was not as dangerous as Mr Lugar and Mr Biden had suggested, and they praised Gen Musharraf as a firm ally in the war on terrorism.

But one of the officials, Peter W. Rodman, assistant secretary of defence for international security affairs, acknowledged that Afghanistan’s “neighbouring countries would like to have a hand in it.”

During a visit to Washington last week, Foreign Minister Khurshid Mehmood Kasuri also had to face several penetrating questions on this issue at his news conference and public appearances and denied assertions that the ISI was assisting the Taliban.

But later, newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post reported that because of ISI’s history of close ties to the Taliban, many American officials believed elements of the service had been providing aid to Taliban and Qaeda units operating in the mountains and caves of southeastern Afghanistan.