ISLAMABAD: Advisor to Prime Minister on Foreign Affairs, Sartaj Aziz has stated that peace cannot be achieved in Afghanistan without reconciliation process.
Addressing the inaugural session of the fifth round of Quadrilateral Coordination Group (QCG) meeting here Friday, Sartaj Aziz said this group of Afghanistan, Pakistan, the United States and China were striving to ensure peace in the war-torn country Geo reported.
Aziz welcomed signing of peace accord between Gulbuddin Hekmatyar group, Hezb-e-Islami and Afghan government, and hoped other militants factions would also ink the peace agreements soon.
The advisor also rejected the impression from some countries that Pakistan was controlling Afghan Taliban.
Aziz urged Kabul for clear and positive response for Afghan Taliban, however, he went on to say that Taliban had not yet extended positive response for dialogues.
He asserted that anti-Pakistan statements from Afghanistan were putting negative impact on peace process. “Pakistan and Afghanistan can jointly control infiltration,” he added. He also condemned recent terror actions in Kabul.
Earlier in an interview with news agency Reuters, Foreign Secretary Aizaz Ahmed Chaudhry said efforts to persuade the Taliban to talk directly to the Kabul government could only bear fruit if the Afghan army stopped the Taliban from gaining the upper hand.
“We believe that there should be effective action by Afghan national security forces to ensure that there are no military gains by the Taliban,” Chaudhry told Reuters in the interview late on Thursday.
The Taliban “need to realize they would have more to gain on the table than they can do on the battlefield”, he said.
Chaudhry said officials at the Islamabad quadrilateral talks – not attended by the Taliban – had told him that gains by the militants in an offensive this year were not as big as the insurgents had hoped.
The first formal talks with the Taliban since their 2001 ouster collapsed in 2015 after it was announced that their founder, Mullah Mohammad Omar, had been dead for two years, throwing the militant group into disarray. The movement has since split on whether to participate in talks.
Chaudhry said the bulk of the Afghan Taliban leadership was in Afghanistan and Pakistan was using all “leverage and influence” at its disposal to get them to the table.
“We are doing whatever we can to persuade the Taliban and the Haqqani leadership, whoever we can contact,” he said. “We believe the Afghan government should also make…a similar kind of effort.”The Pakistani foreign secretary also urged Kabul to create “incentives” and confidence-building measures to persuade the Taliban that it was serious about giving peace a chance.
Chaudhry said the four-country talks were not dead.”We need to remain optimistic,” Chaudhry said. “The signal we get is that the Taliban have not said ‘yes’ to the talks but have also not said ‘no’.”
