With an unstoppable Taliban ravaging through Afghanistan, triggering a mass exodus of Afghans and global community alike, a nuclear-powered Pakistan as its neighbour could spell trouble for not just the Indian sub-continent, but also the rest of the world.
A group of US lawmakers on Wednesday urged President Joe Biden to make sure the Taliban, now the de facto ‘government’ of Afghanistan, does not ‘destabilise Pakistan’ and procure nuclear weapons.
They demanded that the US President should address critical questions on what emerged in Afghanistan, and his government’s plans going forward.
“Are you prepared to support regional allies militarily in the event that the Taliban militarise the Afghanistan border? What is your plan to help to ensure that the Taliban do not destabilise its nuclear neighbour Pakistan? “Do you have a plan to ensure that Afghanistan, under Taliban occupation, will never acquire a nuclear weapon?” the group of 68 lawmakers from the Senate and the House of Representatives questioned in a letter addressed to Biden.
Lawmakers in the US have over the past weeks said that the global community has watched “with utter shock” the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in a blitzkrieg onslaught on the Afghan government, “the result of unforced errors made by withdrawing completely the small remaining footprint of our main military force from Afghanistan, and by unnecessarily delaying the evacuation of US personnel and its Afghan partners”.
“The situation in Afghanistan has rapidly metastasized into Taliban rule with reinstated oppression of women and girls, the repression of civil society, the displacement of countless Afghans from their homes who the Taliban then use force to prevent from fleeing Afghanistan, and a power vacuum that China seeks to fill by increasing its ties to the Taliban,” the lawmakers said, according to news agency PTI.
Noting the aftermath of the US and NATO’s withdrawal of troops from the Central Asian country is not isolated to Kabul alone, or even the West Asian region, they said that the action had geopolitical and strategic significances that will have ripple effects for decades.
“Dealing with these consequences means that we must take action now to chart the course for American strategy, while we manage the immediate repercussions of this self-inflicted crisis in Afghanistan. To this end, we write to ask you to outline what your plan is to move America forward,” they wrote in their letter.
