Pak’s perfidy on Taliban remains unchanged amid drawdown from Afghanistan

Kabul [Afghanistan], July 23 (ANI): With the final drawdown of the US military from Afghanistan just weeks away, Pakistan’s perfidy on the Taliban has remained unchanged.

Writing for news website InsideOver, journalist Federico Giuliani has said that some western think tanks and academia are accepting at face value all the pious statements coming from Islamabad on supporting the peace process in Afghanistan. Despite having experienced two decades of Pakistani “deceit and deception”, some experts still believe that Islamabad is not the problem but a solution to the problem in bringing peace and stability to Afghanistan, he added.

In an opinion piece, Giuliani rejected the analysis by the International Crisis Group (ICG) titled “Pakistan: Shoring up Afghanistan’s Peace Process”. Giuliani said that the basic premise of the ICG is faulty because Pakistan has fuelled the war in Afghanistan by providing support and sanctuary to the Taliban. “Pakistan might pretend that a Taliban monopoly over power in Afghanistan is not its preferred option, but this is purely for Western consumption.”

Despite the overwhelming evidence of Pakistan celebrating a Taliban victory, the ICG insists that Pakistan is concerned about the Taliban establishing their dominance over the war-torn country. According to Giuliani, Islamabad has maintained that Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) is backed by India and Afghanistan to attack Pakistan. “But within Pakistan, any number of genuine experts have pointed out that TTP was nothing but the Pakistani section of the Afghan Taliban.”

“Pakistan needed to invent a casus belli against the TTP without affecting its support for the Afghan Taliban. The easiest way to develop a consensus against something in Pakistan is to attach an Indian label to it, which is precisely what Pakistani did with the TTP,” he  added. Amid the continuing violence in Afghanistan, President Ashraf Ghani last week had lambasted Pakistan for not severing its ties with terrorist groups and said that more than 10,000 ‘jihadi’ fighters had entered Afghanistan in the last month.

At the Central and South Asia connectivity conference, Ghani also rebuked Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan government for its failure to convince the Taliban to “negotiate seriously” in the ongoing peace talks. (ANI)