Pakistan has firmly rejected an allegation by former US envoy for Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad that Islamabad is arming Afghans to fight the Taliban. In a statement on its fact-check account on Saturday, the information ministry called the claims "baseless and misleading".
Khalilzad, who served as special representative for Afghanistan during Donald Trump's first administration, wrote on social media a day earlier that there were "many reports" of Pakistan arming Afghans against the Taliban and recruiting them to fight anti-Pakistan insurgents. He predicted that ties between the two neighbours would get much worse.
The ministry said his assertions merely recycled speculative narratives to prop up what it called the terrorism-supporting Taliban regime. It said it was "particularly misleading" to conflate Pakistan's legitimate counterterrorism operations against groups based in Taliban-controlled areas with allegations of recruiting Afghans or sponsoring armed groups inside Afghanistan.
It pointed to successive UN monitoring reports documenting the presence of terrorist groups, including the banned Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan and Al-Qaeda, in Afghanistan, and said the allegations diverted attention from the Taliban government's responsibility to stop its soil being used against Pakistan.
It is not the first clash between Islamabad and the former envoy. Last November the ministry dismissed his claim that an Islamic State-Khorasan commander had been killed in Punjab, and in March 2023 the Foreign Office said Pakistan did not need his "unsolicited advice". Relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan remain strained over cross-border militancy, and in September Pakistan carried out airstrikes in the border region after attacks in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.