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Pakistan was actively collaborating with the Taliban in Afghanistan while accepting US aid, new US military reports showed, a disclosure likely to increase the pressure on Washington's embattled ally.

Documents leaked by Wikileaks said representatives from Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence met directly with the Taliban in secret strategy sessions to organise militant networks fighting US soldiers.

The White House condemned the leak, saying it could threaten national security and endanger the lives of Americans. Pakistan said leaking unprocessed reports from the battlefield was irresponsible.

US national security adviser Jim Jones said the leak would not affect "our ongoing commitment to deepen our partnerships with Afghanistan and Pakistan."

The revelations were contained in more than 90,000 classified documents which US officials focussed on the period leading to the launch of President Barack Obama's Afghan strategy last December, when he authorised deployment of 30,000 additional troops.

Violence in Afghanistan is at its highest of the 9-year-old war as the thousands of extra US troops step up their campaign to drive insurgents out of their traditional heartland in the south.

"As we continue our force levels and our operations over the summer ... we will likely see further tough casualties and levels of violence," Admiral Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, told reporters in Kabul on Sunday.

The United States has repeatedly urged Pakistan to hunt down militant groups, including some believed to have been nurtured by the ISI as strategic assets in Afghanistan and against arch rival India. Islamabad says it is doing all it can to fight the militancy, adding it was a victim of terrorism itself.

Associated Press reports, WikiLeaks posted the documents Sunday. The New York Times, London's Guardian newspaper and the German weekly Der Spiegel were given early access to the records.

Pakistan's Ambassador Husain Haqqani said the documents "do not reflect the current on-ground realities," in which his country and Washington are "jointly endeavouring to defeat al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies."

The US and Pakistan assigned teams of analysts to read the records online to assess whether sources or locations were at risk.

The New York Times said the documents reveal that only a short time ago, there was far less harmony in US and Pakistani exchanges.

The Times says the "raw intelligence assessments" by lower level military officers suggest that Pakistan "allows representatives of its spy service to meet directly with the Taliban in secret strategy sessions to organize networks of militant groups that fight against American soldiers in Afghanistan, and even hatch plots to assassinate Afghan leaders."

The Guardian, however, interpreted the documents differently, saying they "fail to provide a convincing smoking gun" for complicity between the Pakistan intelligence services and the Taliban.

The leaked records include detailed descriptions of raids carried out by a secretive US special operations unit called Task Force 373 against what US officials considered high-value insurgent and terrorist targets. Some of the raids resulted in unintended killings of Afghan civilians, according to the documentation.

During the targeting and killing of Libyan fighter Abu Laith al-Libi, described in the documents as a senior al-Qaeda military commander, the death tally was reported as six enemy fighters and seven non-combatants -- all children.

Task Force 373 selected its targets from 2,000 senior Taliban and al-Qaeda figures posted on a "kill or capture" list, known as JPEL, the Joint Prioritised Effects List, the Guardian said.

US government agencies have been bracing for a deluge of thousands more classified documents since the leak of helicopter cockpit video of a 2007 firefight in Baghdad. That was blamed on a US Army intelligence analyst, Bradley Manning, 22, of Potomac. link: http://www.thedailystar.net/newDesign/news-details.php?nid=148416

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