EDITORIAL: Last year Pakistan held talks with the self-styled Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) terrorists hosted by the Afghan Taliban, hoping the latter would use their influence to make them abjure violence and reintegrate into this society as peaceful citizens.
But as warned by some former senior military officials who had helped oust those heartless killers from the tribal areas in the military operation Zarb-e-Azb, it turned out to be a vain hope.
Since the talks ended in a standoff last November, TTP militants ensconced in Afghanistan have launched well over a 100 cross-border attacks into this country targeting security forces as well as the police and other civilians. Yet the Afghan government keeps denying the presence of TTP militants on its territory claiming instead they are all in Pakistan.
A recently released UN Security Council report highlights various challenges faced by the Afghan Taliban, and also punctures what they seem to think has plausible deniability.
Affirming Pakistan’s concerns, it says they provided safe havens, material and logistical assistance to the TTP, adding that an estimated 4,000 to 6,000 of its fighters are based mainly in the eastern Afghan provinces of Nangarhar, Kunar, Logar, Paktika, Patiya and Khost – all situated close to this country’s border.
The report goes on to note that while the Afghan Taliban target the IS-K — their own adversary — they have largely looked the other way when it came to the TTP or the Al Qaeda. The second issue left no room for disavowal after Osama bin Laden’s successor Aymen al-Zawahiri living in a Kabul safe house was killed in a US drone strike. But they still protect and defend their ideological brothers, TTP militants, who also helped them fight the NATO and US forces.
The UNSC report points out that the Afghan rulers consider them a part of the ‘emirate.’ The TTP, too, has declared allegiance to the Afghan Taliban supreme leader Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada. He needs to use his authority to rein these terrorists in not only for the sake of peace and security of a friendly neighbour, Pakistan, but his own country.
According to the UNSC report, the TTP could become a regional threat as it might provide an umbrella under which militants (targeting other countries, such as China, Russia and Iran) seeking to avoid the purge by the Afghan Taliban could gather.
That can spell more trouble for that war-devastated country, already under international sanctions and isolated on the diplomatic front because of its rulers’ repressive policies such as a ban on girls and women’s education and exclusionary governance.
Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto had sounded the alarm at the International Security Conference in Munich earlier this year that it would not take much time for terrorism to visit other places beyond Pakistan if the Afghan government did not demonstrate the “will and capacity” to take on militant groups operating from its territory.
It is about time the Afghan Taliban leadership stopped denying TTP terrorists’ presence on its soil and started cooperating with Pakistan to resolve the problem once and for all.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2023
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