ISLAMIC CITY:
Pakistan has made a big policy change: it will no longer support the Afghan Taliban at the international level or offer any other help since the Kabul government failed to stop the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP).
Additionally, Islamabad will no longer give any “special privileges” to the temporary Afghan Taliban government. This is a sign that relations between the two neighbors are getting worse.
Since Pakistan seems to have changed its policy, the chances of the Afghan Taliban government getting world recognition are now much lower than they were before.
Sources in the government told The Express Tribune on Wednesday that the Afghan Taliban government didn’t expect Pakistan to help them or show goodwill after they took back power in August 2021.
After the Taliban took back power, Pakistan became their biggest supporter and ally. They urged the rest of the world, especially Western countries, to keep working with the new leaders in Kabul.
People inside and outside of Pakistan often had strong opinions against Pakistan’s strategy of speaking for the Afghan interim government. But at the time, officials defended the policy by saying they had no choice but to work with the Afghan Taliban because they were real.
Together with other countries in the region, Islamabad worked to get sanctions against the Afghan Taliban government lifted and for Kabul to be able to get the money that the US had frozen soon after Kabul fell in August 2021.
For the Afghan interim government to work better, Pakistan also helped Afghanistan in many ways, including trade and other services. Sources said that Pakistan would no longer do anything nice for the Afghan Taliban government because they were hiding “our enemies.”
A trustworthy source said, “They had a choice, but it looks like they chose the TTP over Pakistan.” The source was referring to a message sent to Kabul in February by a high-level Pakistani delegation that included the defense minister at the time and the director general of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
The Afghan Taliban government, on the other hand, said again on Wednesday that militants were not using Afghan land to attack other countries and that Pakistan’s security issues were completely internal.
Zabihullah Mujahid, a spokeswoman for the Taliban, said, “In response to what the caretaker prime minister of Pakistan said today, we would like to say that the Islamic Emirate wants peace and stability in Pakistan just as much as it wants peace and stability in Afghanistan.”
“The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan is not in charge of keeping Pakistan peaceful.” “Their own problems should be solved first, and they shouldn’t put the blame on Afghanistan,” Mujahid said.
