In a rare moment of candour and a little over two months ahead of the scheduled withdrawal of US forces from embattled Afghanistan, Pakistan’s interior minister, Sheikh Rashid Ahmed, has (unwittingly or otherwise) made a remarkably rare admission, one that cannot but embarrass the government in Islamabad.

Specifically, that the families of Afghanistan’s Taliban militants “reside in Pakistan”, notably in the periphery of the country’s capital.

Advertisement

Mr Ahmed’s presentation can be contextualised with Prime Minister Imran Khan’s stout refusal to host US bases for action inside Afghanistan, saying it would again be targeted for revenge by terrorists if civil war ensued. He had posed a remarkably pertinent query ~ “If the US with the most powerful military machine in history, couldn’t win the war from inside Afghanistan after 20 years, how would America do it from bases in our country?” Islamabad has been consistently rejecting allegations levelled by Afghan leaders that the Taliban use Pakistani soil to direct and sustain insurgent activities in Afghanistan.

In an interview aired by the private Pakistani TV channel, Geo News, on Sunday, the Interior Minister said, “Taliban families live here in Pakistan ~ in areas like Rawat, Loi Ber, Bara Kahu and Tarnol.”

These places exist on the map, but it was scarcely known that such relatively obscure places are used as Taliban turf.

The areas mentioned by the minister are well-known suburban areas of Islamabad, reaffirming that as often as not, Pakistan plays footsie with the Taliban. “Sometimes their (fighters) dead bodies arrive and sometimes they come here to hospitals to get medical treatment,” Rashid told the Urdu-language network.

His statement doesn’t run counter to the interior ministry’s perception. It is rare for a Pakistani minister, helming the crucial interior department, to spill the beans, so to speak, in the manner he has done.

The interior minister said that the former military dictator, Pervez Musharraf, believed in the efficacy of drone attacks to target rebels in areas which were inaccessible to Pakistani forces. The Taliban has intensified attacks against Afghan government forces since May 1 when the US-led international forces formally began their withdrawal from the country.

In an opinion piece in The Washington Post, the Prime Minister wrote, “If Pakistan were to agree to host US bases, from which to bomb Afghanistan, and an Afghan civil war ensued, Pakistan would be targeted for revenge by terrorists again.”

The interior minister’s pregnant assessment serves to negate Islamabad’s outright rejection of allegations levelled by the United States and Afghanistan that Taliban terrorists use Pakistan’s soil to direct and sustain their activities in Afghanistan.

In parallel, Islamabad has blamed Afghanistan for facilitating militants and other illegal movements into Pakistan from its 2600-km-long open border. Parts of Pakistan do serve as a hideout for Taliban insurgents. It is an intricate plot for President Ashraf Ghani.