A day after Russia warned the US administration against piling up pressure on Pakistan, Iran has censured Donald Trump’s new Afghanistan strategy, saying Washington is employing ‘destabilising’ policies in the region.
Earlier this week, the US president announced 4,000 new troops for deployment to Afghanistan, backtracking from his earlier promise to end America’s longest war.
The conflict that began in October 2001 as a hunt for the 9/11 attackers has turned into a vexed effort to keep Afghanistan’s divided and corruption-hindered democracy alive amid a brutal Taliban insurgency.
However, Tehran wants Washington to “stop interfering in the internal affairs of other countries”.
“What the US today is condemning other countries for is the very outcome of its own wrong and irrational policies over the years in the region and particularly in Afghanistan,” Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Bahram Qassemi said Thursday night, reported PressTV.
Washington’s “opportunistic strategies and unilateral policies, coupled with its interventions, have only intensified chaos and tension and spread terrorism and extremism across the region,” he added.
Advising the White House against adopting intruding policies and deciding for other nations, Qassemi said, “The countries of the region have the required capacity to cooperate in the fight against terrorism and maintain stability and security in their own region.”
The Iranian foreign ministry said regional countries “do not need American’s destablising and terrorist breeding policies.”
Trump, meanwhile, also accused Pakistan of “housing the very terrorists that we [Americans] are fighting” in Afghanistan.
“No country in the world has done more than Pakistan to counter the menace of terrorism. No country in the world has suffered more than Pakistan from the scourge of terrorism, often perpetrated from outside our borders,” Pakistan’s Foreign Office said in reaction to the new policy.
Similarly, the country’s civil and military leadership out rightly rejected the “specific allegations and insinuations” levelled against Pakistan, insisting that scapegoating Pakistan will not help stabilise the war-ravaged country.
