WASHINGTON: Pakistan has said that the entire international community is responsible for the mess in Afghanistan and it is wrong to put all the blame on Islamabad.

“Pakistan cannot be held responsible for the mess in Afghanistan, which is the result of the collective failure of the international community,” said Ambassador Jalil Abbas Jilani.

The country’s envoy in Washington was responding to reports and opinion pieces in the US media criticising Pakistan’s alleged negative role in Afghanistan.

Blaming Pakistan for all the ills in Afghanistan was “biased and negates the complex history of this prolonged conflict,” he said.

Mr Jilani noted that a recent editorial in The New York Times accused Pakistan of “duplicity and double game,” which was not only wrong but also “extremely painful, especially when Pakistan has suffered the most due to war in Afghanistan”.

He said that hundreds of suicide bomb attacks and tens of thousands of civilian casualties were the direct result of the US-led war in Afghanistan after 9/11.

“Instead of complaining the heavy cost imposed on us due to sustained external intervention in our neighbourhood, Pakistan has consistently cooperated with the United States and coalition forces in sharing intelligence and decimating the terror outfits operating from the region,” the ambassador said.

He pointed out that since 2009, Pakistani forces had been engaged in incremental operations to clear the Pakistani soil from all terrorist networks without any discrimination.

Such networks were “able to gather in this area because of the competing interests and mutual rivalries of the big powers,” he added. “It is Pakistan’s military which fractured the back of Taliban through indiscriminate counterterrorism operations.”

Mr Jilani said that instead of putting the entire blame on Pakistan, the US media should focus on the protracted Afghan refugee issue and lack of border management as the underlying reasons for regional instability. Omitting such fundamental questions that impede a long-term solution to the Afghan problem, only underlined the existing biases of the US media, he added.

Economic integration

The ambassador rejected the suggestion Pakistan benefited from instability in Afghanistan. “We wish them peace and prosperity. To this end, we are pursuing mutually beneficial economic integration through the policy of a peaceful neighbourhood,” he said.

Mr Jilani said that on Thursday regional leaders inaugurated Casa-1000 power transmission project that would bring Pakistan and Afghanistan closer.

Earlier, Pakistan played “a completely neutral role” in the Afghan elections and offered every possible assistance to the (Ashraf) Ghani government to find a political solution to this crisis in his country.

The ongoing QCG process, involving the US and China besides Pakistan and Afghanistan, has rightly agreed that the long-term peace in Afghanistan can only be achieved through reconciliation between the various Afghan stakeholders, Mr Jilani said.

“It is imperative that this peace initiative be given a chance to succeed what the war has failed to achieve in the last 15 years,” said the ambassador.

Published in Dawn, May 14th, 2016