Pakistan’s Defence Minister Khawaja Asif has delivered one of his strongest and most candid indictments of Pakistan’s past alliance with the United States, accusing Washington of exploiting Islamabad for strategic objectives before discarding it “worse than toilet paper.”
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Speaking in Parliament, Asif said Pakistan’s decision to realign with the US after 1999, particularly in relation to Afghanistan, proved to be a historic miscalculation whose consequences continue to haunt the country.
Challenging decades of official narrative, the defence minister rejected the claim that Pakistan’s role in Afghanistan was driven by religious obligation.
Asif acknowledged that Pakistanis were mobilised and sent to fight under the banner of jihad, calling the framing misleading and deeply damaging.
He said the education system was reshaped to legitimise these wars and added that many of those ideological changes remain embedded even today.
According to Asif, the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan during the 1980s was dictated by American geopolitical interests, not religious necessity, and never met the conditions for a legitimate declaration of jihad.
Afghanistan wars left lasting scars
The defence minister argued that Pakistan’s participation in conflicts that were never its own produced long-term instability, radicalisation and social damage that the country has yet to fully reverse.
He said the pursuit of external approval came at the cost of internal cohesion, leaving Pakistan to absorb the fallout long after global powers moved on.
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Referring to the period after the September 11, 2001 attacks, Asif said Pakistan once again aligned with Washington, turning against the Taliban to support the US-led war on terror.
Using unusually blunt language, he told lawmakers that Pakistan was treated “worse than toilet paper,” used for a purpose and then thrown away.
He accused former military rulers Zia-ul-Haq and Pervez Musharraf of entangling Pakistan in external wars whose consequences were borne entirely by the country.
‘Losses can never be compensated’
Asif said that while the US eventually withdrew, Pakistan remained trapped in violence, economic strain and ideological damage.
“The losses we suffered can never be compensated,” he said, calling the decisions irreversible mistakes that reduced Pakistan to a pawn in conflicts driven by others.
