LONDON: This is with reference to Iqbal Jafar’s article of November 24 titled “Let the truth be told”. It seems that the writer is a Taliban sympathiser given that he seems to find little that they do wrong. Perhaps he should go to Afghanistan and ask people there what they think about the Taliban and whether they are freedom fighters.
The article seems to be romanticising a bunch of thugs by calling them ‘freedom fighters’ and ignores the fact that our support of the Taliban has made us extremely unpopular in Afghanistan. What part of ‘freedom fighting’ involves indoctrinating children to become suicide bombers? Of course, this is not to say that America and Isaf are angels. But given that many of the Afghan Taliban take sanctuary in Pakistan, saying that we should differentiate between them and the Pakistani Taliban and look the other way (in the case of the former) is tantamount to implicitly supporting terrorist attacks in Afghanistan.
The brutality that the TTP and its affiliates have unleashed in Pakistan has cost the lives of over 30,000 innocent Pakistanis. Why should we look the other way given that the Afghan Taliban have done pretty much the same in Afghanistan?
Nadir el-Edroos
Published in The Express Tribune, November 25th, 2011.
