‘Safe havens’ inside Afghanistan, UNSC told

new york — Terrorist “safe havens” are inside, not outside Afghanistan, Pakistan told the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) on Wednesday, reports Dawn online.

“The resilience of the insurgency led by the Taleban cannot be explained away by convenient references to external ‘safe havens’ or ‘support centres’,” Ambassador Maleeha Lodhi, Pakistan’s permanent representative to the UN, said during a debate on Afghanistan.

Relations between the two countries have turned sour since Afghan President Ashraf Ghani accused Pakistan of waging an ‘undeclared war of aggression’ against Afghanistan. Pakistan and Afghanistan have long accused each other of turning a blind eye to militants operating along their porous border. Pakistan, Lodhi asserted at the UNSC, was committed not to allow its territory to be used for terrorism against other country. Pakistan’s Zarb-i-Azb and subsequent Raddul Fasaad military operations had succeeded in eliminating all terrorist and militant groups from its tribal territory bordering Afghanistan, she said.

She told the 15-member Council that Pakistan is “implementing border controls, including the fencing and monitoring of vulnerable sections of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.”

Responding to critical remarks made by her Afghan counterpart during the debate, she said: “As a country that continues to host over two million Afghan refugees, Pakistan expects gratitude and not hostility from the Afghan government.” The main thrust of Ambassador Lodhi’s arguments centred around the need for a negotiated end to the Afghan war. She said that it had been Pakistan’s consistent position that peace could be restored only through a negotiated settlement between Kabul and the Afghan Taleban. This, she pointed out, “has also long been the consensus of the international community,” noting that a negotiated peace was also backed by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who had recently visited Kabul.