Pakistan’s Defence Minister Khawaja Asif has issued a stark warning to the Afghan Taliban, threatening them with their “complete destruction”, adding that Islamabad would force them to “flee back to the Tora Bora caves.”
The Tora Bora mountain pass in eastern Afghanistan was used by the Taliban for 20 years, after their ouster from power in 2001.
In a strongly worded statement posted on X on Wednesday, Asif remarked that Islamabad wouldn’t even need to use a fraction of its military power to “completely obliterate the Taliban regime,” adding that a repeat of their retreat to the Tora Bora mountains would be “a spectacle to watch.”
He further accused the Taliban regime of dragging their already war-ravaged nation to yet another war, just for the sake of preserving their grip on power and sustaining their alleged “war economy.”
Asif’s comments came amid the conclusion of the Qatar and Türkiye-mediated ceasefire talks in Istanbul, between Islamabad and Kabul, which notably failed.
Claiming that Pakistan had only joined the negotiations “at the request of brotherly countries who were persistently being beseeched by the Taliban regime,” he added that the “venomous statements” issued by Taliban officials during and after the discussions exposed what he called the regime’s “devious and splintered mindset.”
“Despite knowing the hollowness of their war cries, they are beating the drums of war to maintain their crumbling façade,” he wrote. “If the Taliban insist on ruining Afghanistan and its innocent people once again, then so be it.”
In dry mockery and dismissal of the warning that “Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires,” the Pakistani Defence Minister wrote: “Pakistan doesn’t claim to be an empire, but Afghanistan is definitely a graveyard — surely for its own people. Never a graveyard of empires, but certainly a playground of empires throughout history.”
Claiming that the Taliban’s “warmongers” were profiting from the instability in the region, he declared they were greatly underestimating Pakistan’s “resolve and courage,” and remarked, “If the Taliban regime wants to fight us, the world will, Inshallah, see that their threats are nothing but a performative circus.”
