Afghan President Ashraf Ghani said in a televised speech Monday that Pakistan must end its support for Taliban militants if peace talks are to continue, shortly after the latest fatal suicide attack in Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital.
Five people were killed and 16 injured in a Taliban attack Monday at a checkpoint near the entrance to Kabul’s international airport, according to news reports.
This followed a wave of attacks in the capital Friday in which at least 56 people were killed, including a U.S. Army Special Forces soldier, Master Sgt. Peter A. McKenna Jr. of Bristol, R.I. It was the worst terrorist violence in the city in years.
Pakistan’s support for the Taliban has dogged U.S. and allied efforts to rebuild a stable Afghanistan since coalition forces ejected the Islamist extremist group from power at the end of 2001. Over more than a decade, even as the main U.S. supply lines ran through the country and U.S. drones used its airbases to launch attacks on Islamist extremists, Pakistan continued to shelter the Taliban’s leaders and allowed safe havens for its fighters.
Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif had pledged a new approach after a bloody Dec. 16 attack by the group’s Pakistani branch on a military school in Peshawar. But Ghani claimed Monday that this had not materialized, and said it’s time for Pakistan’s government to apply the same definition of terrorism with regard to Afghanistan as it does at home.
“Pakistan still remains as venue and ground for gatherings from which mercenaries send us a message of war,” Ghani said. “We can no longer tolerate to see our people bleeding in a war exported and imposed from outside.”
Ongoing peace talks between Ghani’s government and the Taliban are a key part of the Obama administration’s goal of getting the remaining 10,000 U.S. troops out of Afghanistan by the end of the year. The revelation last month that longtime Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar had died in Pakistan in 2013 had already thrown the talks into turmoil, and any further blow is likely to increase pressure on the White House to back off that timetable.
