Federal Minister for Information and Broadcasting Attaullah Tarar said on Monday that Pakistan would press the campaign against terrorism with full force until the threat was cleared from the country and the wider region. He welcomed what he called a positive change in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. People there, he said, had made up their minds to stand against terrorism and wanted it finished permanently. He was speaking at an international conference on Pakistan’s evolving counter-terrorism landscape and regional peace and security, the Associated Press of Pakistan reported from Islamabad.
The human toll, he said, was more than 90,000 lives, and the economic cost exceeded $100 billion, after decades in which Pakistan had stayed at the front of that war. He called the country an ambassador of peace, a voice for regional security and a symbol of resistance to violent extremism. Every Pakistani life given in the fight, he said, had added to national security and to peace beyond Pakistan.
Resolve in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa
Tarar tied the speech to how people in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa have answered terrorism. He said he had lately been to Kohat, a district where attacks had taken place, and had met injured people at the Combined Military Hospital. He set that visit next to his view that the province wants the threat removed for good, not left in place.
The government, the Foreign Office led by Senator Ishaq Dar, and the military were of one mind on eliminating terrorism, he said. “The people of this region deserve better. The people of this region deserve prosperity, welfare, and security,” he said. Pakistan, he added, would draw on willpower, determination and inner strength. It understood the scale of the problem, he said, and had the capacity to come through it.
Safe havens and the TTP
He said attacks were still reaching Pakistan from safe havens across the international border with Afghanistan. United Nations and independent assessments, he said, estimated more than 6,000 Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) terrorists inside Afghanistan, with total terrorist numbers above 20,000. The TTP is the group he held responsible for using Afghan soil against Pakistan.
After the Afghan Taliban took power in 2021, he said, the TTP kept using that territory to recruit, train, facilitate, plan and strike. Pakistan had hit back, he said, because it could not leave Afghan territory as a base for attacks, and a wish for peace should not be mistaken for weakness. He pointed to the 38th United Nations Monitoring Report, which he said had logged the shift of almost 2,000 TTP terrorists and their families away from the border into areas deeper inside Afghanistan. He asked how the region could be peaceful while those sanctuaries stayed open.
Talks, refugees and mediation
A stable Afghanistan, he said, had been a standing Pakistani aim, because calm there would mean more trade with Central Asia, along with investment, cooperation and easier links. He said Pakistan had joined talks in several countries, with the deputy prime minister, the defence minister and the national security adviser among those involved, to tell the interim Afghan government that Islamabad wanted peace and a better life for Afghans in particular. That work had not delivered what Pakistan hoped for. Efforts to find common ground had continued, he said, but the latest negotiations had failed.
Pakistan had taken in more than four million Afghan refugees over more than four decades and carried a heavy cost, he said, without seeing that welcome returned. He dwelt on Afghans, especially women, who he said had been refused education and a chance to earn, and left out of working life. The ideology of the Afghan regime, he said, fed violent extremism and was not Islam. Denying women and minorities basic rights while encouraging extremism, he added, put regional peace at risk.
He also spoke of Pakistan’s recent role in mediation between the United States and Iran, which he offered as proof that the country would help settle conflicts. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Senator Muhammad Ishaq Dar, and Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir had all contributed, he said, and other countries were taking note. Turning to Marka-e-Haq, he said Pakistan had shown it could defend itself and prevail when war was forced on it, and that it could also help make peace. He ended on a region built around prosperity and security.
In his telling, Pakistan will keep up a full-force fight and will not treat the cross-border sanctuaries he described as a closed matter.
