British foreign secretary William Hague has announced that UK taxpayers will increase foreign aid to Pakistan to £665 million as leaked Afghanistan war documents revealed that the Taliban is controlled and funded by the Pakistani government.

The shocking treason, which was known to the government but suppressed as “classified” intelligence, was exposed in the recent dramatic WikiLeaks American war documents scandal.

Amongst the thousands of classified reports put onto the Internet by WikiLeaks are several papers which detail how Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) gives money and supplies to the Taliban in Afghanistan.

According to the documents, which have been confirmed as genuine, in many cases the ISI even provides the Taliban with details and orders to attack selected targets.

Mr Hague’s announcement of an increase in foreign aid to Pakistan therefore means that British taxpayers are directly funding a government and nation which in turn supplies the Taliban insurgency which is killing British soldiers in Afghanistan.

During the 2008/2009 period, UK bilateral aid spending in Pakistan totalled £120 million. This was increased by Mr Hague to £665 million.

According to the leaked documents, the Taliban is stronger than ever and a crucial component of their success is the support they receive from ISI.

Pakistan’s military nurtured the Taliban in the 1990s and has maintained ties to the group ever since. According to reports, this fact has been known in British, American and Afghani circles for a long time, and the Afghan government has even said that “ending Pakistani support for the Taliban is the key to ending the war,” according to reports.

The Christian Science Monitor, for example, has reported that “US officers and diplomats, generally speaking off the record, concur that elements within Pakistan’s military establishment have been providing safe-haven to the Taliban inside their country — and some training, though they tend to be more coy about how high the contacts go.”

Afghan President Hamid Karzai responded to the Wikileaks reports by calling for the US to do more to address the support of Pakistan for the Taliban, who are largely drawn from the Pashtun ethnic group that straddles the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier.

“The recent documents leaked out to the media clearly support and verify ... that success over terrorism does not come with fighting in Afghan villages, but by targeting its sanctuaries and financial and ideological sources across the borders," President Karzai said in a statement. "Our efforts against terrorism will have no effect as long as these sanctuaries and sources remain intact."

The WikiLeaks documents show that that former ISI chief Lt Gen Hamid Gul has frequented Pakistani madrassas where suicide bombers are trained for Afghanistan, and has attended planning meetings involving the Afghan Taliban seeking to attack both Afghan officials and foreign troops inside the country.

The documents also revealed that General Gul has “reached out” to Taliban allies Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani, who run independent insurgent groups of their own.

Thanks to the Lib-Lab-Con Lie Machine, British taxpayers are giving money to the same people who are killing our troops. In previous times, this would have been called treason and the perpetrators would have faced the severest penalty for such gross betrayal.