The Pakistan Defence Minister, Khawaja Muhammad Asif, has slammed the Taliban’s chief spokesperson, Zabihullah Mujahid, alluding that Pakistan will eradicate terrorism regardless of the Taliban’s stance.
Asif said in a tweet on Sunday that Pakistan is committed to “uprooting” terrorism from its soil regardless of whether or not Kabul has the “will to reign in militants from within its borders.”
This comes following Mujahid’s remarks who said the Taliban’s policy toward Pakistan is different for the group had signed the Doha agreement with the US, not Pakistan.
The Pakistan Defence Minister had expressed concerns about the presence of Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) fighters in Afghanistan and the “involvement” of citizens of Afghanistan in terrorist activities in Pakistan.
In a tweet in Urdu on Saturday, Asif stated that the terrorists who have harmed Pakistanis have sought refuge in Afghanistan. He emphasized that the Taliban does not fulfill the obligations of good neighborliness and brotherhood, nor do they adhere to the Doha Agreement.
The Doha agreement, which was signed between the then-Trump administration and the Taliban in February 2020 in Doha, Qatar, was a deal that eventually paved the way for all US and NATO troops to withdraw from Afghanistan in mid-August 2021, ending two decades of intervention in the country.
One of the commitments under the deal was for the Taliban to not allow Afghanistan soil to become a safe haven for transnational terrorist outfits. But the group has been consistently criticized for harboring terror groups operating in Afghanistan.
Pakistan has accused the Taliban of failing to crack down on terrorist groups, particularly the TTP, that have wreaked havoc in Pakistan by attacking Pakistani security forces, foreign nationals, and civilians, leading to insecurity in the country and the region.
The US State Department had said that the Taliban was not fulfilling its pledges and harbored Ayman al-Zawahiri, the former leader of Al-Qaeda, who was killed in a US drone strike in Kabul on 31 July 2022.
A UN Security Council report in June said that the Taliban maintains strong and close links with several terrorist groups in the country, including Al-Qaeda, the TTP, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement, Jamaat Ansarullah, and others.
However, the Taliban has denied allegations of maintaining links with terrorist outfits, saying there is “no threat from the territory of Afghanistan to the neighbors, region, and the world.”
