Al-Mirsad Cannot Whitewash Taliban’s Terror Record

Al-Mirsad has once again turned its pen against Pakistan, accusing Islamabad of sponsoring terrorism. The claim arrives without evidence, without documentation, and without the credibility that comes from independent scrutiny.

That is because Al-Mirsad is not an independent outlet. It functions as the Taliban’s propaganda arm, tasked with directing global attention away from what Afghanistan has actually become under Taliban rule: a sanctuary where terrorist organizations operate with remarkable freedom.

Consider what the latest article really represents. It is not journalism in any meaningful sense. It is a carefully constructed diversion, built to pull eyes away from the Taliban regime’s well-documented history as patron and protector of militant networks based on Afghan soil. Journalism investigates and verifies. Propaganda asserts and deflects. This piece belongs firmly in the second category.

The accusations against Pakistan collapse the moment they meet scrutiny. Meanwhile, successive reports from the UN Monitoring Team and from the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) tell a consistent and troubling story. These are not one-off assessments produced by a single hostile source.

They are recurring, methodical findings from bodies tasked with tracking exactly this kind of activity, and they keep arriving at the same conclusion: terrorist sanctuaries continue to operate freely inside Afghanistan.

Why would Al-Mirsad reach for conspiracy theories instead of engaging with this record? Simply put, it cannot rebut what has already been documented by international monitors. Facts are inconvenient things when they contradict the story you are trying to tell, so the outlet substitutes suspicion and blame-shifting for evidence. This is a recognizable pattern, and it rarely survives contact with actual scrutiny.

Here lies the deeper contradiction the Taliban cannot escape. The regime exercises complete territorial control over Afghanistan, yet that same territory reportedly hosts more than twenty international and regional terrorist groups, among them the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, Al-Qaida, and the Islamic State Khorasan Province.

A government cannot simultaneously claim full command of its territory and full innocence regarding what happens within it. Either the Taliban controls Afghanistan, in which case it bears responsibility for the groups operating there, or it does not control Afghanistan, in which case its claims to sovereign authority ring hollow. Both propositions cannot be true at once, no matter how the narrative is packaged for foreign audiences.

There is also a simple test the Taliban keeps failing. If the regime had genuinely dismantled terrorist infrastructure within its borders, the international community would have little reason to keep flagging Afghanistan as an operational center for extremist recruitment, training, and cross-border attacks.

Yet assessment after assessment continues to identify exactly that. Independent verification, not self-reported claims, is what should determine whether a threat has diminished, and independent verification keeps pointing the other direction.

Seen in this light, the accusations against Pakistan follow a familiar and rather old playbook. Shield the actual perpetrators. Cast blame onto the victims of cross-border militancy. Distract audiences from failures at home by manufacturing grievances abroad. Projection tends to work only when nobody checks the underlying record, and in this case, the record is extensive, consistent, and public.

None of Al-Mirsad’s messaging changes the underlying reality. Afghanistan under Taliban rule remains the region’s foremost hub of terrorist safe havens, a status confirmed repeatedly by independent monitoring bodies rather than by any single government’s political agenda. Propaganda campaigns can shape headlines for a news cycle or two, but they cannot erase what has already been documented across years of monitoring, reporting, and firsthand observation by the international community.

Words printed on a Taliban-aligned platform do not carry the same weight as findings verified by multiple independent institutions, and that gap in credibility is precisely what Al-Mirsad’s latest piece was designed to obscure.