Islamabad: Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan has said that the Taliban are not some military outfit but normal citizens. He also asked how Pakistan was supposed to hunt down Afghans when the country had nearly three million Afghan refugees at its borders who shared the same ethnic group as the Taliban.
In an interview with PBS NewsHour aired Tuesday night, Khan stressed that a majority of the Afghan refugees in Pakistan were Pashtuns, the same ethnic group as Taliban militants.
Pakistan has been long accused of helping the Taliban militarily, financially and with intelligence inputs in their fight against the Afghanistan government, but Imran Khan dismissed these accusations as “extremely unfair”.
Stating that the United States has “really messed it up” in Afghanistan, Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan questioned the American motive for the 2001 invasion of the country in the first place and then their subsequent attempts of seeking a political solution with the Taliban from a position of weakness. Khan also said that the only good solution to Afghanistan’s situation is through a political settlement that is “inclusive and involves all factions, including the Taliban.