ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Imran Khan said on Tuesday Pakistan was ready to be a partner for peace in Afghanistan with the United States but would avoid risking further conflict, saying his country was opposed to a military takeover of Afghanistan.

The Pakistani prime minister said this in an opinion piece published in the Washington Post on June 22, which comes amid slow progress in Taliban and Afghan government peace talks in Qatar and as violence rises dramatically around the country ahead of the withdrawal of foreign forces by September 11.

Khan said the neighboring countries had the same interest: a political settlement in Afghanistan as well as stability, economic development and the denial of safe havens for militants.

“We oppose any military takeover of Afghanistan, which will lead only to decades of civil war, as the Taliban cannot win over the whole of the country, and yet must be included in any government for it to succeed,” Khan wrote. “In the past, Pakistan made a mistake by choosing between warring Afghan parties, but we have learned from that experience. We have no favorites and will work with any government that enjoys the confidence of the Afghan people. History proves that Afghanistan can never be controlled from the outside.”

Khan said Pakistan has also suffered from the wars in Afghanistan, saying more than 70,000 Pakistanis had been killed and losses to the Pakistani economy had exceeded $150 billion. After joining the US war on terror, Pakistan was targeted as a collaborator, the PM said, leading to attacks against Pakistan from the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan and other groups.

“While I argued for years that there was no military solution in Afghanistan, the United States pressured Pakistan for the very first time to send our troops into the semiautonomous tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, in the false expectation that it would end the insurgency,” Khan wrote.

“It didn’t, but it did internally displace half the population of the tribal areas, 1 million people in North Waziristan alone, with billions of dollars of damage done and whole villages destroyed.”

“The “collateral” damage to civilians in that incursion led to suicide attacks against the Pakistani army, killing many more soldiers than the United States lost in Afghanistan and Iraq combined, while breeding even more terrorism against us. In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province alone, 500 Pakistani policemen were murdered.”

Khan warned that if Pakistan were to agree to host US bases from which to bomb Afghanistan, and an Afghan civil war ensued, “Pakistan would be targeted for revenge by terrorists again.”

“We simply cannot afford this,” the PM wrote. “If the United States, with the most powerful military machine in history, couldn’t win the war from inside Afghanistan after 20 years, how would America do it from bases in our country?”