In a shocking statement, Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan has said that the Taliban is not some military outfit, but ‘normal civilians’. He also termed a recent report of 10,000 Pakistani fighters crossing over the border to help the Taliban as “absolute nonsense.”
Imran Khan’s statement also comes at a time when Afghanistan is in a tussle with Pakistan as the former has repeatedly accused it of aiding the Taliban. Pakistan has been accused of aiding the Taliban and its affiliates militarily, financially and with intelligence inputs in their fight against the Afghanistan government. However, Khan has dismissed the allegations as ‘extremely unfair’. Imran Khan said the United States “really messed it up” in Afghanistan by initially looking for a military solution and then attempting to seek a political solution from a position of weakness. In an interview with PBS NewsHour aired Tuesday night, Khan said that the US should have opted for a political solution when the presence of Nato forces in Afghanistan were at an all-time high and not when they had reduced the troops to “barely” 10,000. In addition, he also claimed that thousands of Pakistanis lost their lives in the aftermath of the US war in Afghanistan. However, Pakistan and its army continue to provide a safe haven to the insurgent groups and their affiliates. As per a report prepared for the UN Security Council, about 6,000 terrorists of Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) are operating on the Afghan side of the border. The TTP which follows anti-Pakistan objectives also supports its Afghan counterparts inside Afghanistan against Afghan Forces, the report by the UN Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team said.
