Imran Khan has said the outlawed Pakistani Taliban was allowed to flourish because of the “negligence” of the country’s security forces, as the former prime minister underlined the importance of working closely with Afghanistan to jointly combat terrorism in the region. Khan, the chairman of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party, who was ousted from power in April 2022, made these comments in an interview with the Voice of America website on Saturday. In the interview, Khan, 70, strongly defended his government’s move to greenlight negotiations with the Tehreek-e-Taliban (TTP) terrorist outfit.
“Well firstly, what were the choices [the] Pakistani government faced once the Taliban took over and they decided the TTP, and we're talking about 30, [30,000] to 40,000 people, you know, the families included, once they decided to send them back to Pakistan? Should we have just lined them up and shot them, or should we have tried to work with them to resettle them? “We had a meeting, and the idea was that the resettlement had to be done with the concurrence of the politicians of all along the border, the FATA [tribal] region, and along with the security forces, plus, the TTP. But that never happened because our government left and once our government was removed, the new government took its eye off the ball,” Khan said.
He pinned the blame on the negligence of Pakistan’s security forces that allowed the banned outfit to prosper in the region.
“Meanwhile, this threat grew and it's possible that they regrouped, but then where were the Pakistani security forces? Where were intelligence agencies? Could they not see them [re]grouping? So, the problem is, how could we be held responsible for their negligence?” he asked.
Pakistan has been hit by a wave of terrorism, mostly in the country's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, and also in Balochistan and Punjab provinces.
Khan asserted that despite the differences between the two sides, Islamabad must get Kabul to work jointly to combat terrorism in the region.
“I'm not saying it's going to be easy, but do we want a repeat of what happened to Pakistan from 2005 onwards to 2015, where Pakistan was going under, suffering from terrorism all along the Afghan border? I think we are not in a position to have another war on terror. And the only way is to somehow get Kabul to work with us so that we can jointly deal with this issue,” Khan explained.
Khan, who came to power in 2018, is the only Pakistani Prime Minister to be ousted in a no-confidence vote in Parliament in April 2022.
Since his ouster, he has stepped up the ante on the ruling coalition to announce snap polls.
During the Apex Committee meeting earlier this month, Pakistan’s civil and military leadership decided to seek Afghan Taliban chief Haibuttallah Akhundzada’s intervention to control the TTP.
In November last year, the TTP called off an indefinite ceasefire agreed with the government in June 2022 and ordered its militants to carry out attacks on the security forces.
Pakistan hoped that the Afghan Taliban after coming to power would stop the use of their soil against Pakistan by expelling the TTP operatives but they have apparently refused to do so at the cost of straining ties with Islamabad.
On January 30, a Pakistani Taliban suicide bomber blew himself up in a high-security mosque in Peshawar, killing over 100 worshippers and injuring 200 others.
The TTP, set up as an umbrella group of several militant outfits in 2007, called off a ceasefire with the federal government and ordered its militants to stage terrorist attacks across the country.
The group, which is believed to be close to Al-Qaeda, has been blamed for several deadly attacks across Pakistan, including an attack on army headquarters in 2009, assaults on military bases, and the 2008 bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad.
In 2014, the Pakistani Taliban stormed the Army Public School in the northwestern city of Peshawar, killing at least 150 people, including 131 students.
(This report has been published as part of the auto-generated syndicate wire feed. Apart from the headline, no editing has been done in the copy by ABP Live.