Staff reporter Islamabad
The National Security Adviser Dr Moeed Yusuf has said it is “shameless” of India to engage the Afghan Taliban in Qatar after having supported operations against the insurgent group for a long time.
Yusuf was commenting on Indian External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar’s recent stopovers in Doha to meet with the Taliban leadership in the Qatari capital twice in the last three weeks.
Earlier this month, Indian publication The Hindu quoted a senior Qatari official as confirming that Indian officials made a “quiet visit” to Doha in order to meet the Taliban’s political leadership based there.
“I want to ask this: with what [moral] standing did this Indian high-level official meet [the Taliban] there? Did they not feel ashamed?” Yusuf said when asked how Pakistan viewed the India-Taliban meetings on a private channel programme on Monday.
“[The Indians] kept having the Taliban killed daily and kept giving funds for operations against them and today they have reached there to have talks,” he added. He said the meetings were “a matter of shame” and not a strategic move.
Yusuf emphasised that the Taliban whom the Indians had met were also “not stupid”, saying he was not concerned by the contacts between India and the insurgent group amid the United States withdrawal from Afghanistan. “You should also ask what response the [Indians] got from the [Taliban],” he added.
