Pakistan believes that the new Afghan leader emerging from next month’s presidential elections will have better chances than President Hamid Karzai’s outgoing government at opening serious peace talks with the Taliban, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing top Pakistani officials.
“A new government with legitimacy that is elected will improve the prospects for a more meaningful interaction and dialogue for reconciliation and peace,” National Security Adviser Sartaj Aziz was quoted as saying in an interview with the newspaper.
With no candidate winning an outright majority in the first round last month, former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah and former World Bank executive Ashraf Ghani will contest a runoff that Afghan election authorities set for June 14. Karzai has ruled Afghanistan since the 2001 US invasion.
A successful election would “strengthen Kabul’s hand in creating a broad-based coalition of all the stakeholders, and we will want that”,
Tariq Fatemi, the foreign affairs adviser of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, was quoted as saying in the same dispatch from Islamabad. “We want whoever comes to power to be able to reach out to all segments of the Afghan society.”
Aziz, the national security adviser, outlined the parameters of the peace discussions so far, and said it would not be in Pakistan’s interest to have the Afghan Taliban control swaths of territory across the border because those areas could become havens for the Pakistani Taliban terrorists.
Instead, he suggested the Afghan Taliban should be offered a share of power through governorships of some provinces and other unelected appointments, something he said has been raised by Karzai.
“Not territory, but participation. You have to make it worthwhile for them,” Aziz was quoted as saying. “That kind of power sharing, certainly they are stakeholders,” he added. “The main thing is, we from the outside should not dictate to them what they should do and what they should not.”
Fatemi added that, in any future peace talks, Pakistan “will not be in the driving seat. We will only play a supporting role.”
Nawaz Sharif, who came to power a year ago, has attempted to improve Pakistan’s relations with Kabul, building a personal rapport with President Karzai and repeatedly stressing Islamabad’s new policy of non-interference in Afghan affairs, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The dispatch said that Pakistan intends to remain strictly neutral in the race between Abdullah and Ghani.
“We would follow a policy of having no favourites because, whatever policy may have been followed in the past, it had proven to be non-productive, in fact counterproductive,” Fatemi was quoted as saying.
“Our policy of non-interference hopefully can be followed by other regional countries, so there are no more proxy wars in Afghanistan,” Aziz said. “Let Afghanistan’s fate be determined by the Afghans themselves. Once they have sorted out all their problems, we can all compete in trade and reconstruction and development, but not in the power games.”