The outlawed Tehreek-e-Taliban was attacking Pakistan from within its soil, its chief has claimed while he was evasive about getting any support from the Afghan regime—its ideological twin next door.
“We are fighting Pakistan’s war from within the territory of Pakistan; using Pakistani soil. We have the ability to fight for many more decades with the weapons and spirit of liberation that exist in the soil of Pakistan,” Noor Wali Mehsud said in an interview with CNN.
Since the end of a shaky ceasefire agreed with the government in November, the TTP has staged many attacks in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan. But, many locals say they had seen the reentry of armed people in the mountainous area of the KP months before the announcement as part of the negotiations started by the former government of PTI.
The escalating violence is coupled with increased cross-border tensions between Pakistan and Afghanistan, with the former exhorting the latter to not allow its soil used as a launch pad for attacks.
To a query pertaining to such claims and whether the support from Afghanistan’s interim government was kept secret, Mehsud denied it. “When we don’t need any help from the Afghan Taliban; what is the point of hiding it?”
But he holds expectations from Kabul for “its own fight” in return for helping to push the US out of Afghanistan.
These issues were part of discussions with the Taliban officials when Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Hina Rabbani Khar visited Kabul last month.
She rebuffed rumours that she was not offered a meeting with one of Afghanistan’s officials during the trip to the country.
“We are able to achieve exactly what we really wanted to achieve. Our job is to do deep, useful diplomacy away from theatrics,” Khar said in response to a query in a press conference last week where she accused India of orchestrating terrorist attacks in Pakistan.
The very next day after the trip the TTP claimed responsibility for an attack in Quetta, where a suicide bomber had targeted a police van helping a polio vaccination team, killing four and injuring 27.
Pakistan has condemned the use of Afghan soil by terrorists to carry out activities in Pakistan and urged the Afghan government to take stern action against such elements.
The US has also expressed concerns over the rise of violence in Afghanistan and the Taliban’s failure to not provide “safe havens” to terrorist groups. “The US’ broader goal was to make sure that terrorists and others aren’t able to use Afghanistan as a launch pad for attacks on Pakistan,” State Department spokesperson Ned Price said in a press briefing earlier this month.
To support this assertion, Price mentioned the killing of the al-Qaeda leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, by a US strike in August.
But, Mehsud was defiant and warned the US against any attack on the group’s leadership.
“I did not expect America to take such action against his group. America should stop teasing us by interfering in our affairs unnecessarily at the instigation of Pakistan – this cruel decision shows the failure of American politics,” he said.
He threatened the US that “if America takes such a step, America itself will be responsible for its loss.”
According to the TTP chief, the US was yet to understand the “duplicitous policy” of Pakistan.
“Pakistan’s history is a witness that it keeps changing directions for its own interests,” he said and blamed Pakistan for violating the truce.
He accused Pakistani forces of “violating the ceasefire and martyred tens of our comrades and arrested tens of them.”
Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, who is in the US to chair the G77 ministerial meeting, said Pakistan would not tolerate cross-border terrorism by the TTP or other terrorist groups, like the BLA.
When asked if Islamabad would consider disengaging with Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers because they were allowing them to carry out the attacks, he said: “I can’t wish the Taliban away or Afghanistan away. They are a reality, and they are on my border, but the modes and ways in which we are engaging, particularly within the Pakistani context, and as far as the TTP is concerned, perhaps that can be reconsidered, as far as the strategy is concerned.”
