WASHINGTON, Jan 28 (Reuters) – Pakistan sees a chance to
resume stalled peace talks that aim to end the long conflict in
Afghanistan if Taliban militants are willing to engage with the
Afghan government once President Hamid Karzai steps down, a top
Pakistani official said on Tuesday.
“My own feeling is that after the election the Taliban will
probably talk to the new government more … than the present
government,” Sartaj Aziz, a senior adviser to Pakistani Prime
Minister Nawaz Sharif on national security and foreign affairs,
said in Washington.
“So one should hope that before 2014 ends some kind of
dialogue will be going on,” Sharif told an audience at Johns
Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.
Preparing to step down after 12 years in power, Karzai has
demanded that the United States restart peace talks with the
Taliban, which have appeared to be frozen since the summer, as a
condition for allowing U.S. troops to remain in Afghanistan
beyond 2014. The presidential election is set for April.
The Obama administration has been pressing Karzai to sign a
security pact that would permit some U.S. and NATO troops to
remain in Afghanistan beyond this year, a step widely seen as
needed to ensure the country does not collapse back into civil
war.
A main obstacle to the U.S.-backed effort to get peace talks
going in earnest has been the Taliban’s reluctance to engage in
direct talks with the Karzai government and Karzai’s insistence
that his government take part.
Aziz said his government had no objections to allowing a
senior former Taliban leader now in Pakistan to facilitate
renewed peace talks, possibly by permitting him to travel to a
third country.
In a move that some Afghans hoped would help rekindle the
peace talks, Pakistan announced in September that it would
release Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taliban’s former
second-in-command, but the extent of his freedom remains
unclear.
Aziz said Baradar’s fate remained sensitive because the
United States saw him as a security threat.
While Aziz also repeated Pakistani concerns about the future
instability in Afghanistan as foreign troops withdraw, he said
he did not expect a “broad civil war” as occurred in the 1990s,
when the Taliban seized the Afghan capital and imposed strict
Islamist governance on Afghanistan.
He said that if elections are held as planned, and the new
government is able to manage the security threat, “the
possibility of overrun by the Taliban is not very likely.”
In any case, Pakistan could seek to shield itself from
insecurity in Afghanistan “by having better border management,”
Aziz said.
(Reporting by Missy Ryan; Editing by Mohammad Zargham)
