Three senior Taliban members traveled to Pakistan this week and held a series of meetings with Pakistani officials in Islamabad, mainly to brief them about the recent talks held in Qatar between the Taliban and Kabul, a senior Taliban official, an Afghan diplomat and a Pakistani official said Saturday.
The Afghan ambassador to Pakistan, Hazrat Omar Zakhilwal, said he was aware of the meetings but refused to offer details. “We know about these recent meetings but we don’t know what was discussed between the Taliban and Pakistani officials,” he said.
According to a senior Taliban official, the Taliban who were sent to Pakistan were Mullah Salam Hanifi and Mullah Jan Mohammed, both former ministers in the Taliban government, and Maulvi Shahabuddin Dilawar, a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
A senior Pakistani security official confirmed the latest meetings between the Taliban and Pakistani authorities, saying Islamabad is playing its role to ensure peace in neighboring Afghanistan. Pakistan has repeatedly said it will support any effort aimed at bring peace in Afghanistan.
“We will keep making efforts to facilitate talks between Kabul and the Taliban, as we did in July 2015, but the world knows who scuttled the peace process at the time and we do not want to discuss those bitter things,” said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to speak to media on the record on the issue.
Pakistan arranged the first ever face-to-face talks between Kabul and the Taliban in 2015, but the peace process broke down after the Afghan government announced the death years earlier of the Taliban’s one-eyed founder and leader Mullah Mohammed Omar.
In the time since, a leadership struggle within the Taliban’s ranks broke into the open and Omar’s successor was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Pakistan. The latest development came after Taliban and Afghan government officials held new secret talks in Qatar aimed at restarting peace negotiations to end the country’s long war.
Pakistan was not involved in the talks and the Taliban said Pakistan was not aware of them until they were over.
Pakistan’s foreign ministry said Thursday that Islamabad believes a four-country group comprising China, the United States, Afghanistan and Pakistan and which was formed to help bring the Talban into dialogue with Kabul, is the best forum in which “Pakistan is ready to play its role.” It said Pakistan would continue to back the “Afghan-owned and Afghan-led peace process.”
Afghanistan’s President Ashraf Ghani, angered by a series of attacks in Kabul he blamed on Taliban living in Pakistan, said he no longer wanted Pakistan involved in negotiations.
The former head of the Taliban’s Doha office, Muhammad Tayyab Agha, sent a letter sent this month to the Taliban’s new leader, Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada, urging the movement leaders to leave Pakistan and break ties with Islamabad. The Afghan government and the United States have accused Pakistan of harboring the Taliban, including its fiercest faction, theHaqqani Network, blamed for some of the worst attacks, particularly in Kabul.
Agha’s Pashtu language letter was given to Radio Free Europe’s Pashtu-language Mashaal Radio on Thursday, after Akhundzada asked Agha to return to the Doha office.
In the letter, Aga said the Taliban leaving Pakistan would prevent Pakistan from interfering and would also benefit Pakistan, which is under increasing international pressure to help get the Taliban to the negotiating table and to force them out of Pakistan.
Agha’s letter also urged the Taliban to drop reference to the Doha office as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and refer to the Taliban as a movement instead, bowing to one of the key demands of the Afghan government, which has refused to accept the Doha office as a government-in-exile.
Agha also said Akhundzada should drop the title Amir-ul-Momineen, or Leader of the Faithful, which had been adopted by Mullah Omar.
A major demand and one that would affect the Haqqani network was that the Taliban control “foreign fighters.” He also wanted permission to devise a policy with consultations from not just religious leaders but also university professors and other elders. Another demand was to remove the Taliban’s links to the Pakistani and Iranian intelligence agencies, a step likely to anger both countries. Agha also called for an end to attacks on mosques throughout the country.
The Guardian adds
The development follows the revelation this week that Taliban officials held two rounds of secret talks with Afghanistan’s spy chief and a senior US diplomat in the capital of the Gulf state, Doha, this month and last month – meetings Pakistan was excluded from despite its long association with the Islamist movement.
Two sources within the insurgency told the Guardian that a trio of Taliban diplomats left Doha on Wednesday with a mission to hold talks with Pakistani officials.
“The visiting Afghan Taliban delegation will discuss various topics, including peace talks, and share the latest information with Pakistan,” a senior official told the Guardian.
The men are Maulvi Shahabuddin Dilawar, a former ambassador to Pakistan, Mullah Jan Muhammad Madani, a former foreign minister under the Taliban regime in the 1990s, and Mullah Abdul Salam, a former deputy education minister.
The Taliban official said the discussions being held in Pakistan follow successful contacts made with both Afghan and US officials in recent months.
“Taliban and the Americans have been engaged in a number of rounds of talks in Qatar,” he said. “They have made some progress, on a very zigzag path. God willing, we hope further talks will create progress.”
Last year Pakistan succeeded in establishing itself as the host and broker of an effort to end the 15-year insurgency in Afghanistan. Islamabad managed to bring Taliban, US and Chinese diplomats around the same table at a breakthrough meeting in the Pakistani hill resort of Murree in July 2015.
But a scheduled second meeting never took place after the Afghan government confirmed that the former Taliban leader Mullah Omar had died years previously and that the movement had been run in his name by Mullah Akhtar Mansoor.
After a bitter leadership fight, Mansoor formally became the Taliban leader but showed little interest in re-engaging in the Pakistan-brokered process.
Mansoor was killed by a US drone strike in May, creating further uncertainty about the chances of peace talks.
Although Pakistan has been a key ally for the Taliban during both its rise to power in the 1990s and its re-emergence as an anti-Nato insurgency after 2001, some within the movement resent Pakistani interference in the Taliban’s affairs.
A Taliban official who talked to the Guardian said the group’s current leader, Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada, had sought to “speed up” talks with Kabul and the US.
He said: “Pakistan and the rest of the neighbours will be gradually brought on board. Pakistan is an important neighbour and no doubt they will want to be involved.”
But a western official who was aware that at least two of the Taliban envoys had travelled to Pakistan said the envoys’ meeting was unlikely to be related to the recent Doha talks.
The official said it was an attempt by Islamabad to wrest back control and escape “immense US pressure and international isolation”.
“They and a group from Quetta are talking to the Pakistanis about a Pakistan-led process,” the official said. “This is a separate initiative to escape US and Chinese pressure.”
The official said some within the Taliban had objected to the way members of the political commission appear to have been summoned to Islamabad.
The Taliban is split between rival factions, both among and between commanders on the battlefield in Afghanistan and those living inside Pakistan. Bitter divides exist over whether to pursue peace talks or not, as well as over the control of money and resources.
The western official described the current situation within the movement as “chaos as normal”.
Quoting a Taliban official, the Associated Press reported this week that the head of the Doha office had not taken part in the talks with the Afghan government, reflecting “a continuing power struggle within the movement over who should run the Qatar office”.
A Pakistani intelligence official declined to comment on the latest claims.
This article originally appeared on www.abcnews.go.com ,October 23, 2016. Original link.
This article originally appeared on www.theguardian.com . Original link.
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