Pakistan Official: Taliban 'Will Help Us Conquer' Disputed Kashmir

The Taliban terror group recently promised to support Pakistan in its efforts to “conquer” Kashmir, a disputed Western Himalayan region, the leader of Pakistan’s ruling party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), claimed Tuesday.

“Look at Afghanistan. The Taliban tells us that they’re with us. God-willing, they will help us conquer Kashmir,” PTI leader Neelam Irshad Sheikh said during a live television interview with a Pakistani news channel on August 24.

The name “Kashmir” refers to the northernmost region of the Indian subcontinent. It borders northern India, northeastern Pakistan, western China, and parts of eastern Afghanistan. India administers two portions of Kashmir — Ladakh and the joint Jammu and Kashmir — as federal territories. The region is primarily disputed by the governments of India, Pakistan, and China at present, but has been the subject of competing territorial claims by all of those countries, plus Afghanistan and others, for centuries.

The Taliban stormed Kabul, Afghanistan’s national capital and seat of government, on August 15. The jihadist group took mere hours to depose the city’s U.S.-backed government and declared itself Afghanistan’s new ruler. Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan on August 16 compared the Taliban’s toppling of Kabul to breaking the “shackles” of “cultural enslavement,” referring to the U.S.’s nearly 20-year-long occupation of Afghanistan.

“You take over the other culture and become psychologically subservient. When that happens, please remember, it is worse than actual slavery. It is harder to throw off the chains of cultural enslavement,” Khan said in Islamabad, Pakistan, on August 16.

“What is happening in Afghanistan now, they have broken the shackles of slavery,” he asserted.

The U.S. launched the Afghan War in the autumn of 2001, ending the Taliban’s rule in Kabul. The military operation, which proceeded with support from NATO-allied troops, began in response to jihadist attacks on U.S. soil on September 11, 2001. The two-decade-long campaign saw the Western forces attempt to shape Afghanistan into a more secular society.

New Delhi has long accused Pakistan’s government of supporting the Taliban, in part by harboring its militants, along with allied Al-Qaeda terrorists, within its borders. Washington similarly cited the Taliban’s alleged “harboring” of Al-Qaeda and its leader at the time, Osama bin Laden, in 2001 as a justification for its invasion of Afghanistan, as Al-Qaeda had perpetrated attacks on U.S. soil on September 11 of that year. The U.S. government eventually tracked bin Laden to Abbottabad, Pakistan, where a special operations team of the U.S. military killed him in May 2011.

The Taliban may transfer weapons it allegedly acquired from U.S.-funded Afghan government forces to terrorists based in Pakistan for use in potential terror attacks in Kashmir, senior officers of the Indian Army told Asian News International on August 24. The military officers spoke on condition of anonymity, but revealed the following:

There are a lot of inputs that suggest that these American-origin weapons especially small arms are being sent to Pakistan. But the way terror groups have been emboldened there by the Taliban victory, there is a possibility of these weapons being used for violence in Pakistan itself.

“The Indian Army’s counter-terrorist grid in the Kashmir valley is fully geared up to tackle terrorists even if they are equipped with superior weaponry and survival equipment,” the sources said.

“The counter-infiltration grids are already there in place on both the Line of Control and hinterland in the Kashmir valley,” they added. The Line of Control is the Indian term for its official border with Pakistan.