…but Pakistan can’t deliver Taliban for peace talks

The two-day trilateral summit appears to be a failure for Afghan President Hamid Karzai whose wishful request for Pakistan’s assistance in providing access to the Taliban leadership for talks has been shrugged off. “Deliver Mullah Omar? If this is the expectation, then there is no reality … They are not only unrealistic, but preposterous,” Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar told a group of journalists following the trilateral summit at the President’s House. Afghanistan’s administration has been seeking Pakistan’s cooperation in dialogue with the Taliban, as Kabul feels that it was sidelined by Washington during recent peace talks held with the militants. Khar also admitted that talks during the summit were tough. “The talks were hard. But sometimes you need to have hard talks … We are willing to look at anything. But if you have unrealistic, almost ridiculous expectations, then you don’t have a sort of common ground to begin with,” she said. The foreign minister said her recent visit to Kabul had helped mend fences with Afghan officials. She said Kabul should tell clearly what kind of assistance it was expecting from Pakistan in peace process. Interior Minister Rehman Malik also said that Kabul had been informed that Islamabad was ready to provide assistance in talks. “Talks are already underway with Taliban in Qatar. Let them (Afghanistan) inform us what
role they wanted for Pakistan in the peace process,” he said. When asked if Pakistan had been asked to bring the Taliban leadership to table with the Karzai administration, Malik said that it would be unjust to claim that Islamabad enjoyed such an influence to bring a certain militant group to the dialogue table. However, he added that since the Afghan government was the main stakeholder in the peace process, Pakistan was ready to help in its capacity.
“Pakistan wants peace. We don’t want that this region should suffer further,” he said. When asked if Pakistan would side by Iran in case of an attack by Israel, Malik said his country’s objective was to ensure peace in the region, which was already suffering due to terrorism and other conflicts. “The international community should resolve all issues through dialogue,” he said.
Asked if Islamabad’s commitment to complete the Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline would offend Washington, Malik said that regional cooperation should not be taken as an alliance against a specific country. “If we talk to resolve our issues bilaterally, this should not mean that we are uniting against the US or any other nation,” he said, adding that the lack of a common strategy was complicating the resolution of regional conflicts.
About border security issues between Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Malik said that Pakistan had called for installing border check posts. He said that 40 to 50 people cross the Pakistan-Afghanistan border everyday without any entry in official records. “We don’t want to carry on with the blame game. We have told Afghanistan that establishing border check posts would resolve 80 percent issues. However, if no action is taken against the infiltrators in future, we would take unilateral action.”
He said the three neighbouring countries were facing a common challenge of terrorism and they needed to evolve a common strategy to fight out the terrorists. He said the militants were getting money from drug trafficking and threatening world peace. He said a good roadmap against militancy could help tackle the challenge.
To a question, Malik denied that the Pakistani government was holding talks with the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan. “We have received some messages from the Taliban, but talks would only be held with those who join the mainstream,” he added.