ISLAMABAD: Interior Minister Sheikh Rashid said on Wednesday Pakistan had not provided military assistance to the Taliban, as a new bill moved by US senators seeks to assess Islamabad’s role in Afghanistan before and after the fall of Kabul.

The Afghanistan Counterterrorism, Oversight, and Accountability Act aims to address outstanding issues related to the Biden administration’s “rushed and disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.”

It calls for a comprehensive report on who supported the Taliban during America’s 20 years in Afghanistan, helped the group in capturing Kabul in mid-August and supported the insurgents’ offensive on Panjshir Valley, the last part of Afghanistan still holding out against their rule until early this month.

“We will help our Afghan brothers if humanitarian crises develop in Afghanistan, we are not providing military help to them. This is all rubbish,” Ahmed said in a press conference.

"US is accusing us that we facilitated Taliban, but we only facilitated them to bring them to the table for talks in Doha," Ahmed said, referring to Pakistan's efforts in convincing the Taliban to engage in talks with Washington last year.

The talks yielded an agreement that became the grounds for last month’s US military withdrawal from Afghanistan. The US itself and the international community had recognized Pakistan as being key in bringing the Taliban to the negotiating table.

Also on Wednesday, Pakistan’s foreign office said the US bill was “completely unwarranted” and “inconsistent” with the spirit of US-Pakistan cooperation.

“The legislation includes references to Pakistan that are completely unwarranted. We find all such references inconsistent with the spirit of Pakistan-US cooperation on Afghanistan since 2001,” the foreign office said in a statement on Wednesday.

It added that “sustained security cooperation” between the US and Pakistan should remain “critical” in case of any future terrorist attacks in the region.

Pakistani Human Rights Minister Shireen Mazari has said the country was being “scapegoated” for US failures in Afghanistan.

“So again Pak will be made to pay heavy price 4 being an ally of US in its ‘War on Terror,’” Mazari wrote in a series of tweets. “20 years of presence by economically & militarily powerful US & NATO left behind chaos with no stable governance structures. Pak now being scapegoated for this failure.”



“It is time for those powers who were present in Afghanistan to look to their own failures instead of targeting Pak which paid a heavy price in lives lost, social & econ costs, refugees — all for being an ally & suffering constant abuse, in a war that wasn’t ours,” she said.

Despite being allies in the war on terror, Pakistan and the United States have had a complicated relationship, bound for decades by Washington’s dependence on Islamabad to supply its troops in Afghanistan but plagued by accusations that Pakistan was playing a “double game.” Pakistan denies this.

Earlier this month, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Washington would be looking at its relationship with Pakistan in the coming weeks to formulate what role it would want Islamabad to play in the future of Afghanistan.

In the first public hearing in Congress about Afghanistan since last month’s collapse of the US-backed Afghan government, Blinken told the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee that Pakistan has a “multiplicity of interests some that are in conflict with ours.”

While the remarks were downplayed by State Department spokesperson Ned Price, Islamabad said they were “not in line with the close cooperation” between Islamabad and Washington.

Pakistan has had deep ties with the Taliban and has been accused of supporting the group as it battled the US-backed government in Kabul for 20 years — charges denied by Islamabad.