President Obama’s national security adviser met secretly in the Persian Gulf with Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani to deliver a tough message: rein in the Haqqani network, The New York Times said in a report on Thursday. Just a few weeks before, however, American officials held a secret meeting with leaders of the Haqqani network. But then, the purpose was to explore ever so delicately how the group, or at least some of its members, might join talks to end the war in Afghanistan, said the report.
According to the Times, the two meetings, held just over a month apart, underscored the Obama administration’s complicated and seemingly contradictory policies in Afghanistan and Pakistan as it struggled to end the decade-old conflict in Afghanistan and salvage a deteriorating security relationship with Pakistan. The talks with the Haqqani network, which were brokered by the Pakistani spy agency, illustrated the administration’s recognition that military strikes alone would not end the fighting with the Taliban, the Haqqanis and other insurgents in Afghanistan, said the report. But the discussions, which one official cited by the Times described as “very preliminary”, yielded no results. And within weeks, senior American officials were blaming Haqqani fighters for a truck bombing at a NATO outpost south of Kabul on September 10, which killed at least five people and wounded 77 coalition soldiers, and a 20-hour assault on the US embassy in Kabul.
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