NEW YORK: Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari on Friday urged the interim Afghan government to demonstrate its will to take on terrorist groups within their soil and ensure that Afghanistan does not become a hotbed to extremism.
The foreign minister, in an interview with Newsweek during his visit to New York, said since the fall of Kabul, Pakistan had witnessed an uptick of terrorist attacks within Pakistan.
He viewed that the events around the fall of Kabul emboldened religious extremist groups, particularly in Pakistan, even though the country had defeated them.
“We have broken the backs of terrorists, the visuals coming out of Afghanistan did obviously empower that mindset,” he added.
The foreign minister said Pakistan had come a long way from having terrorist attacks every week, with thousands of casualties, to a relative calm as a result of its military operations in South Waziristan and North Waziristan.
“We really got a handle on this issue, not only domestically, more recently we’ve managed to demonstrate internationally within the rules-based order with the FATF [Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering] requirements that we completed two action plans, counter-terrorism and on money laundering, no small feat.”
“Pakistan has concerns with the TTP. The international community has concerns with al-Qaeda and other groups, we also have those concerns. The Chinese have concerns about ETIM [East Turkestan Islamic Movement] and we share those concerns,” Bilawal Bhutto said.
He maintained that the Taliban government would be able to deliver in one year or two years what all of NATO was unable to deliver in 20 years.
“I’m not undermining the efforts that are made against them, but they were there. And it’ll take time for the new government. And I want to give them that chance to demonstrate that they can take on this issue, that they can deliver on their commitment. The alternate scenario is not something that I think is in anybody’s best interest.”
To a question, the foreign minister said in the context of the COP27 negotiations, the G77 played an important role on getting the necessary consensus of loss and damage added onto the agenda. The agreement for a financial arrangement and a loss and damage fund is a step in the right direction, he added.
He told the interviewer that Pakistan experienced an almost-apocalyptic climate catastrophe in the form of flooding.
“But we weren’t alone during the course of our presidency. Across the planet, we’ve had extreme weather events, from here in the United States, with the forest fires, as well as in South America, and the extreme weather events in Europe, from flooding, droughts in the U.K. to the extreme, prolonged and extended droughts in China and to the monster monsoons that significantly impacted Pakistan.”
In order to combat these challenges, particularly for the developing world, he said the fundamental reforms were needed to make the international system serve “all of us and not just some of us.”
“That’s what we’ve been advocating for. We have a document coming out of our Ministerial Conference of the G77, which is a consensus document that addresses a lot of these issues.”
Asked about the removal of Imran Khan through the vote of no-confidence, Foreign Minister Bilawal said it was an incredibly important moment in Pakistan’s democratic transition and significant development of Pakistan’s democratic journey.
Anybody who’s been following Pakistan’s long struggles through dictatorship and democracy can’t underplay how significant that development is.
“That reaction is what we’re seeing in the manifestation of Mr. Khan. His extremist positions, his very narrowminded populism, his politics of hate, his politics of division, his politics of fiction.”
He urged Imran Khan to have faith in democracy, to return to parliament, to do his job as the democratic opposition from within parliament.
Coming to the Kashmir issue, the foreign minister mentioned the Indian outrageous actions of August 2019.
“It is not only blowing up multilateralism, blowing up bilateralism, it is a unilateral solution, an insult to the United Nations and an insult to the United Nations Security Council, the violation of not only international law, the Fourth Geneva Convention,” he remarked.
He said due to these very reasons, the relations between both countries, attempts to find a peaceful solution, and a peaceful arrangement between the two countries had been frozen.
He said as long as the underlying issue of Kashmir was not addressed, there was a consistent sort of tinderbox ready to explode in the way. You could have spiraling consequences for our region, he added.
To another question, the foreign minister said Pakistan had a great relationship with China and had a great historic relationship with the United States as well.
He said Pakistan had played a significant role in the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries and would play a role to bridge the divide, whatever it could do.
He hoped that the countries would be able to create a consensus to move away from sort of hyperbolic partisan politics. I believe that it’s better to find areas in which you agree, where you can work together, rather than focusing on areas where you disagree, he commented.
