On Saturday, Indian police said the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), along with Lashkar-e-Taiba, branded a terrorist group by the United States, was behind bomb blasts that killed 186 people and wounded hundreds in Mumbai on July 11.

President Pervez Musharraf had already spent the latter days of a lengthy overseas trip fending off Afghan and British insinuations that members of his security apparatus were covertly supporting the Taliban insurgency raging in southern Afghanistan.

Coming just two weeks after Musharraf managed to get India to resume a peace process that New Delhi froze after the Mumbai blasts, the timing of the allegation against the ISI is bad.

The agency is well-used to being blamed, though the West had been happy to enlist its support in a covert war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan during the 1980s, just as it is now being used in the war on terrorism.

"Ever since I can remember, whenever there is something on, whenever a blast takes place here, or something in Afghanistan, there is the September 11, all sorts of things, so ISI is always in the eye of the storm," said Lieutenant-General Asad Durrani, a former head of the ISI.

Despite becoming a crucial ally of the West, despite making a foreign policy U-turn in 2001 to abandon support for a Taliban government hosting al-Qaeda, and despite starting peace talks with India almost three years ago, doubts remain about whether Pakistan's spies are still playing a double game.