"Given reports that some Pakistani military officers have close and troubling ties with the Taliban in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, isn't there considerable risk to providing increased intelligence capabilities to them. Couldn't those capabilities fall into the wrong hands and actually end up helping the Taliban to avoid attacks?" asked Senator Collins.
General Petraeus acknowledged that this is a concern and he responded that U.S. strategy depends on building trust between our country and Pakistan.
Senator Collins also expressed concern with the Administration's decision to deploy 17,000 additional American troops to Afghanistan without clear, specific benchmarks to determine if the new strategy is successful. "We should not be committing additional troops before we have a means of measuring whether this strategy is successful," said Senator Collins.
In his remarks to the Committee, General Petraeus testified that destabilization of the nuclear-armed Pakistan would present an "enormous challenge" to the United States and its allies. "Pakistani state failure would provide transnational terrorist groups and other extremist organizations an opportunity to acquire nuclear weapons and a safe haven from which to plan and launch attacks. The Pakistani state faces a rising - indeed, an existential - threat from Islamist extremists such as Al Qaeda and other transnational terrorists organizations, which have developed in safe havens and support bases in ungoverned spaces in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region," he said.