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Afghanistan tells UNHRC it is victim of state-sponsored terror from Pakistan
Afghanistan has accused Pakistan of state-sponsored terrorism and told the UN Human Rights Council that there cannot be any distinction between good and bad terrorists.
In a rare outburst at a United Nations body, Afghanistan has accused Pakistan of state-sponsored terrorism and told Islamabad that there cannot be a distinction between good and bad terrorists, surprising observers at the session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.
Suraya Dalil, the Afghan representative, said on Thursday that the “facts behind state-sponsored terrorism” can be substantiated by quoting on record former Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf, foreign policy adviser Sartaj Aziz and former ambassador to the US, Husain Haqqani.
Dalil’s charges in her statement - after a report on Afghanistan was presented by Kate Gilmore, the deputy high commissioner of human rights - were rejected by the Pakistani representative. But after two rounds of “right of reply”, she insisted that the “evidence presented…was made up of hard facts”.
Recalling a series of terror attacks in Afghanistan this year that left hundreds dead, she said: “Our investigations have declared that the attacks were organised, financed and sponsored outside our territory with composite methods and intricate intelligence.”
Dalil added: “Afghanistan believes that there cannot be a distinction between good and bad terrorists. As long as a distinction between good and bad terrorism is maintained, we are all defeated.
“The recent attacks on a hospital in Kabul as well as attacks in the shrine in Pakistan’s Sindh province serve as unmistakable proof that terror spares no boundaries and targets and that the deceptive classification of good and bad terrorists cost the lives of countless civilians in Pakistan.”
Afghanistan, Dalil said, shared the sorrow and pain of the Pakistani people, and that Kabul remained committed to “state-to-state cooperation with Pakistan based on the principles of mutual respect and non-intervention”.
Dalil and the Pakistani representative sparred in two rounds of “right to reply”, when the latter rejected the allegations accused Afghanistan of trying to “shroud its failures by shifting the blame to Pakistan”. The Pakistani representative also said the people of Pakistan were “at risk from across the border”.
Dalil recalled that “Osama bin Laden had been tracked down in Pakistan a few years ago“ and Afghan Taliban chief Mullah Mansour had been killed “on Pakistani territory”. She said, “The facts presented earlier were not rhetoric from Kabul but hard-core facts. From January until the present, the Pakistani military had violated the frontier several times.”
