Islamic issues continue to be a stumbling block to Western policy strategists, who persistently use see Islamic politics and culture through the lenses of Western norms, giving them big blind spots when anything Islamic does not fall into the neat template of Islam being a religion of peace, a claim that is a big fallacy.

At the Organization for Islamic Cooperation (OIC) summit last Sunday, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan made the case that ISIS-K “threatens Pakistan from Afghanistan, adding that stability in Afghanistan is necessary.” 

Khan, along with many others in the OIC and UN, has pleaded for Western countries to donate money to alleviate the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan. 

However, in reacting to Khan’s remarks, former Afghan President Hamid Karzai accused Khan of not telling the truth. 

Karzai stated that “ISIS from the beginning has been threatening Afghanistan from Pakistan, not the other way around,” adding a new element to an already complex issue in a country that has been famously dubbed “The Graveyard of Empires.” Khan is making it look as though the regional and global threat were coming from Afghanistan, thus pleading for Western money to control this dire threat.

Pakistan has a longtime relationship with the Taliban, going back decades, to the days when the mujahideen were based in the city of Peshawar. According to an NRP interview, a local journalist indicated that many Afghans routinely see the Taliban “as proxies of Pakistan.”

There is thus ample evidence that ISIS and al-Qaeda have not worked in isolation from Islamic countries belonging to the OIC, but have been facilitated by some of them.

“Afghanistan has been facing ISIS threat from Pakistan: Hamid Karzai,” Business Standard, December 20, 2021:

Rejecting Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan’s remarks on terrorism in his country, former Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai on Sunday said that the landlocked country has been facing ISIS’s threat from Pakistan.

At the Organization for Islamic Cooperation (OIC) summit on Sunday, Imran Khan had said ISIS threatens Pakistan from Afghanistan, adding that stability in Afghanistan is necessary. “We have had attacks from (the) Afghan border, from ISIL (ISIS), into Pakistan,” he said.

Reacting to Khan’s remarks, the former Afghan president said these allegations are not true, TOLOnews reported. ISIS from the beginning has been threatening Afghanistan from Pakistan, not the other way around, Karzai added.

“These remarks are not true, and are obvious propaganda against Afghanistan,” Karzai said in a statement. “In fact, from the beginning, Afghanistan has been facing ISIS’s threat from Pakistan.”