Adviser to Pakistan Prime Minister on Foreign Affairs Sartaj Aziz on Monday opened a meeting of the Quadrilateral Coordination Committee (QCC) in Islamabad aimed at reviving the Afghan peace process.
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Pakistan had brokered a rare face-to-face meeting between Afghan officials and Taliban representatives in July last year, The initiative, officially called Murree Peace Process, however, fell apart after news emerged that Taliban’s long-time leader Mullah Omar had died two years ago.
Peace efforts last year stalled after the Taliban announced that their founder, Mullah Mohammad Omar, had been dead for two years, throwing the militant group into disarray and factional fighting over a new leader.
An informed source told Pakistan Today that during the session, Pakistan urged the three countries to come up with their recommendations in the upcoming session due to be held in Kabul on January 18 so that a package could be offered to the insurgents to lure them towards the negotiating table.
Aziz refused to say whether Pakistan has a list of Taliban representatives prepared to enter into peace negotiations.
Mr. Faisal said Pakistan has agreed to block all funding to the Taliban, including in the Pakistani cities of Quetta and Peshawar, near the border with Afghanistan.
He said it was therefore important that pre-conditions were not attached.
Aziz insisted that the “use of military action against the irreconcilables” could not precede talks.
As I discussed at the end of 2015, the current groundwork for resuming peace talks comes after an attempt by both Kabul and Islamabad to pick up the pieces of a failed attempt at bilateral rapprochement between their governments last summer. Travelling to Afghanistan unaccompanied by the country’s powerful ISI intelligence agency, which has always been considered the force behind the Taliban, was a signal, said Gul, that Sharif was centering future policy decisions only at army headquarters.
Thirdly, using confidence-building measures to encourage Taliban groups to join the negotiating table, he added. The group was set up previous year to facilitate the reconciliation process in the war-torn country.
Sartaj warned against prematurely deciding which Taliban factions are ready to talk.
These quartet talks were held between Afghanistan, China, the United States and Pakistan, to draw up a road map for further peaceful dialogue between Kabul and the Taliban. The Taliban are not expected to attend the talks, but there are expectations that an agreement between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the eradication of Taliban boltholes in Pakistan, will go a long way toward hampering Taliban attacks in Afghanistan.
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The question of whether the Taliban could end up being happy with what Kabul can offer may be closely linked to the extent to which Pakistan is satisfied with the direction of the talks.
