US, Pakistan have mutual interest in ensuring Taliban acts against terrorist groups: State Dept.

Washington:The United States and Pakistan have a shared interest in ensuring that the Taliban acts against terrorist groups, including TTP, and not allow them to use the Afghan soil for their actions, State Department Spokesperson Ned Price said.

“Terrorism remains a scourge that has taken so many Pakistani, Afghans, and other innocent lives. The United States and Pakistan do indeed have a shared interest in ensuring that the Taliban live up to the commitments and that terrorist groups like ISIS-K, like the TTP, like al-Qaeda, are no longer able to threaten regional security,” he said in response to a reporter’s question at his daily press briefing.

“The Taliban has proven itself unable or unwilling to fulfill the commitments it has made, this is certainly one of those commitments. In the U.S.-Taliban agreement, the Taliban made a commitment to see to it that international terrorists would not operate freely within Afghanistan,” Price said.

“The United States has in the operation that we undertook a few months ago that eliminated the leader of al-Qaed (Ayman al-Zawahiri) – who was living inside, in Kabul – made very clear that the Taliban had not lived up to that commitment.

As regard the threats by TTP against the top Pakistani political leadership, Price said the US condemns any threat of violence from any group and certainly a threat of violence like this from a terrorist group like the TTP

“We know that the Pakistani people have suffered tremendously from terrorist attacks. We know that the Taliban has made commitments to curtailing the ability of international terrorists to be able to operate on Afghan soil. We continue to call on the Taliban to uphold those counter-terrorism commitments,” he said.

The US, he said, was committed to working with partners, ” but President (Joe) Biden also has a commitment to act unilaterally if and when necessary as we did just a few months ago with Ayman al-Zawahiri to take out threats that emerge in Afghanistan that potentially present a threat to the United States, to our allies, and to our interests.”