MEA spokesperson Raveesh Kumar. (File)Terming Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan’s statement that about 30,000-40,000 “armed people” who fought in Kashmir or Afghanistan were still in Pakistan as a “glaring admission”, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) on Thursday said it is time for Islamabad to take “credible and irreversible action” against terror groups.
“It is a glaring admission by the Pakistani leadership,” MEA spokesperson Raveesh Kumar told the media. The response came a day after the Pakistan PM admitted that about 30,000-40,000 “armed people”, who have been trained and fought in some part of Afghanistan or Kashmir, were in Pakistan and accused the previous governments of not telling the truth to the US about the militant groups operating in the country.
READ | 40 militant groups were operating in Pakistan: Imran Khan
“Until we came into power, the governments did not have the political will, because when you talk about militant groups, we still have about 30,000-40,000 armed people who have been trained and fought in some part of Afghanistan or Kashmir,” Khan said during his appearance at the US Institute of Peace, a US-Congress funded think-tank, on Tuesday.
MEA spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said “it is time for Pakistan to take credible and irreversible action against terrorists”.
Revealing that 40 militant groups had been operating in Pakistan in the last two decades, Khan said successive governments did not disclose this to allies and kept the US in the dark. “We were fighting the US war on terror. Pakistan has nothing to do with 9/11. Al-Qaeda was in Afghanistan. There were no militant Taliban in Pakistan. But we joined the US war. Unfortunately, when things went wrong, where I blame my government, we did not tell the US exactly the truth on the ground,” he said at a Capitol Hill reception.
