There is a need to seriously ponder over the situation arising in Afghanistan where the Taliban continue to advance. As things stand none of the major players in Afghanistan sees eye to eye with Pakistan. The Afghan governments have all along blamed Pakistan for the Taliban’s success. President Ashraf Ghani and some of his close aides have crossed all limits in making wild accusations against Pakistan. National Security Adviser Moeed Yusuf, who returned empty-handed after spending 10 days in Washington says the US officials, lawmakers and scholars he met talked about the past, saying that had Pakistan cooperated with the USA, they could have defeated the Taliban. While Dr Yusuf was still in Washington, the State Department asked Pakistan to keep the Afghan border open for displaced persons, which is highly detrimental to Pakistan’s interests. The way Afghan Taliban are behaving now should raise concerns in Islamabad.
Pakistan hosted, feted and looked after the needs of the Taliban leaders, as a high ranking government official told the Council of Foreign Affairs (CFR) in March 2016. The treatment continued during later years also. This was the time when Pakistan should have demanded that the Afghan Taliban stop the Tehrik Taliban Pakistan leadership which operated from safe havens in Afghanistan from conducting terrorist attacks inside Pakistan. The Afghan Taliban should have also been persuaded to accept the Durand Line as the international border between the two countries. It is a failure of the government’s Afghan policy that the attacks lion by the TTP from Afghanistan continue unabated.
The Afghan Taliban which have still to occupy Kabul have already started putting up demands that can harm Pakistan. On Friday the Taliban closed their side of the border crossing at Chaman, saying no one would be allowed through it until Islamabad dropped or relaxed its visa requirements for Afghans. The Talban demand that the Pak-Afghan border should be “open, morning to evening, for Afghans holding [Pakistani issued] migration cards or [Afghan] ID cards.”
Visa free entry to all Afghans would allow millions of refugees as well as numerous terrorists to enter Pakistan. The very idea negates the need for the thousand-kilometer-plus-long fence being built by Pakistan costing at least $532 million. Several Pakistani soldiers have laid down their lives while safeguarding the fence.
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