Islamabad: Pakistan paid a “very heavy price” of siding with the US in its occupation of Afghanistan, said Prime Minister Imran Khan, adding that hearing American politicians blame Islamabad for its humiliating retreat hurts.
In an interview with Russia’s RT, Khan expressed his anger towards American officials who have pointed fingers at Islamabad when apportioning blame for the US failure in Afghanistan.
His remarks come after the recent Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings as an example of this frustrating rhetoric where US lawmakers accused Pakistan of facilitating Taliban.
“As a Pakistani, I felt deeply hurt by some of the remarks made by those senators. To blame Pakistan for this debacle in Afghanistan is the most painful thing for us to listen to,” he said.
Pakistan was in a tremulous situation when the 9/11 terrorist attacks occurred in the US. Pervez Musharraf, a general who’d come to power through a military coup, had just been elected president and was seeking US assistance for his government. Committing Pakistani support to the invasion of Afghanistan helped secure American military aid, but, Khan believes, was still a wrong call.
It alienated the mujahideen forces, which the Pakistani intelligence helped build up just two decades ago as part of the US anti-Soviet campaign in Afghanistan.
“We have trained them to fight against foreign occupation. It was a holy war, a jihad,” he said. And with the Americans invading, Pakistan was telling the same people that “a fight against the Americans was terrorism. So they turned against us. They called us collaborators.”
Early this week, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken confronted a barrage of questions from US lawmakers about last month’s withdrawal from Afghanistan and the attempts to rescue people and deal with a future Taliban government.
Lawmakers cutting across the party lines demanded more severe action against Islamabad for its subversive role in Afghanistan.