Afghan envoy slams Pak for promoting Taliban

In a scathing attack on Pakistan, Afghanistan has said that "circles within state structures outside our frontiers" used violent behaviour and ideology to promote Taliban who became a "precursor" of today's terrorists staging deadly attacks across the world.
"The creation of Taliban in Afghanistan in 1994 opened the current tragic chapter of terrorism in the world. The Taliban came into existence before terrorist groups, including Al-Qaida, Al-Shabaab, Boko Haram and Da'esh," Afghan's Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN Nazifullah Salarzai said.
"In a way it was Taliban and their backers who characterised the kind of terror that we witness today from various violent extremist groups around the world," he said.

Without naming Pakistan, Salarzai blamed the neighbouring country for supporting and promoting Taliban by using ideology and violent behavior in pursuit of political objectives.
"Religious outfits, sloganism as well as taking advantage of weaknesses emerging from the prolonged conflict in Afghanistan were the cheapest and easiest way to recruit for the ranks and files of Taliban. In this case, ideology and violent behavior were used in pursuit of political objectives by circles within state structures outside our frontiers," he said at the UN Security Council open debate on 'Countering the Narratives and Ideologies of Terrorism' here yesterday.
Salarzai said the Council and the international community should ask "what motivated and still continues to motivate these circles to use violence through proxies in pursuit of political objectives at national, regional and global levels."

He said brutality against civilians began with the Taliban, since it was theterror group that started stoning women to death, closing girls' schools, preventing women from pursuing the livelihood and introducing suicide attacks that brutalized Afghanistan's entire population.

"One can easily trace how Taliban started promoting Al Qaeda and Da'esh type divisive and hateful ideology long ago. Since the Taliban mushroomed overnight in Afghanistan mainly with foreign support", the population in his country has been brutalised, he said.
The ambassador said that the "bloodlust" perpetrated by the Taliban was not limited to Afghanistan and it was under the Taliban that his country "became the jumping board for international terrorism and thousands of young men received training and logistical support in terrorist camps, acting as a precursor of current terrorists staging deadly attacks in Asia, Europe, the United States, the Middle East, Africa."

Posing questions to the Council, he said it must be asked how and why the Taliban came into being and how people recruited by it learnt to drive tanks and fly jets overnight.
"Who trained them and provided them with supplies, who financed them and provided them safe havens and orchestrated their spring offensive year after year," Salarzai said.
Outlining the causes that led to the rise and brutality of Taliban, he said "negative state rivalry" in the region with excessive anxiety and suspicion of one state or the other resulted in adoption of wrong policies.