Pakistan says influencing Afghan Taliban on reconciliation with Kabul

0
146
  • Foreign Affairs Advisor Aziz says strategic and conventional imbalance with India top security concern
  • Says Pakistan will not unilaterally cap nuclear capability

 

 

Pakistan has reaffirmed its commitment to facilitating an Afghan-led reconciliation process, as its top foreign affairs advisor said Islamabad is influencing the Afghan Taliban leaders toward peace talks but made it clear that it is Kabul, which has to deliver in terms of a peace deal.

“We have some influence over them because their leadership is in Pakistan and they get some medical facilities. Their families are here,” Advisor Sartaj Aziz, who led Pakistan at the Strategic Dialogue with the United States Secretary of State John Kerry, told a Washington think tank.

“We can use those levers to pressurise them and say, ‘Come to the table’. But we can’t negotiate on behalf of the Afghan government because we cannot offer them what the Afghan government can offer them,” he said in response to a question at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Pakistan, he said, pressured Afghan Taliban leaders to participate in the first-ever direct talks with the Afghan government last year.

“We have to use these levers and [have] restricted their movements, restricted their access to hospitals and other facilities, and threatened them that ‘If you don’t come forward and talk, we will at least expel you’,” he said in reference to Pakistan’s message to the leaders.

“We have hosted [them] enough for 35 years, and we can’t do it anymore because the whole world is blaming us just by [their] presence here,” he noted.

Pakistan, Afghanistan, the United States, and China are working to push for a roadmap for Afghan talks process.

Meanwhile, Aziz said Islamabad is firmly committed to having peaceful relations with its neighbors and hoped that Pakistan and Indian foreign secretaries would soon resume peace talks, disrupted by early January-2016 Pathankot attacks.

Aziz said a Pakistani Special Investigative Team will visit India to probe the Pathankot terrorist attack.

However, he said the progress on the investigation depends on New Delhi’s co-operation.

In response to a question about the spoilers’ ability to disrupt the peace talks between Pakistan and India he said, “The problem is obviously the people who want to disrupt these talks, non-state actors of course. No country has totally controlled them. So for somebody to orchestrate an incident, with people on both sides of the border, these kinds of incidents would always take place. We have been urging India not to give a veto to these non-state groups.”

“There is one incident and the whole relationship collapses,” Aziz said.

At a briefing at the Pakistani embassy, Aziz said India has been stoking trouble in Balochistan and the tribal areas and Pakistan has submitted a dossier to the United Nations to that effect.

Earlier, Aziz cited the “strategic and conventional imbalance with India” as a major concern for Pakistan.

“I think our security concern is strategic and conventional imbalance with India,” he told Defense Writers Group in a breakfast meeting on Wednesday morning.

Terrorism comes only after that, he added.

“Terrorism is our own domestic (concern). It is overflow of terrorism from Afghanistan that becomes the second (top security concern for Pakistan) within our borders, which hopefully we will be able to control it in the next few years,” he said.

The advisor ruled out any unilateral Pakistani capping on its nuclear capability.

“If India does (cap its nuclear weapons programme) we will think about it,” he said in reply to a question.

“But if India does not, how can we cap?” Aziz said.

“Our nuclear programme is a deterrence. It is India which is expanding its nuclear arsenal at a much faster rate than we are,” Aziz added.

“The concept of deterrence is a dynamic one. Deterrence has to be effective and our deterrence is India centric. If India had not started its nuclear programme, we would never have done this,” he said.

“India is developing its nuclear stockpile. Its ability after the (civil nuclear) agreement with the United States to divert more stocks to it, more fissile materials to nuclear weapons has increased much more,” he said.