The Afghan president has thanked Pakistan’s prime minister for hosting the first official face-to-face talks between the Kabul government and the Taliban. According to a statement Friday from Ashraf Ghani’s office, the Afghan president met with Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on the sidelines of a summit in Russia. Ghani praised Pakistan’s efforts and reiterated his own priorities to have a “permanent peace in Afghanistan. Ghani said”Those confidence-building events, in Oslo and Doha, were essential in laying a path to the one in Islamabad.Crucially to getting to this point in what is now a peace process, there have not been any preconditions laid down, such as a ceasefire, that have hampered previous attempts by the US to engage the Taliban in talks.On the contrary, the leader of the Afghan government delegation, Deputy Foreign Minister Hekmat Karzai, said that there were no demands made on the Taliban to stop fighting. And there was no offer to stop large-scale military operations against the Taliban.This is the first time that talks have taken place between such high-ranking officials from either side. That the talks are taking place in Pakistan is a point not to be missed. President Ghani’s enlisting of the help of Pakistan and Pakistan’s outreach to ensure that all parties come to the table speaks volumes for how much the two sides wish to make the region stable. Pakistan seems to have realised just how impossible peace will be without stability in neighbouring Afghanistan, how detrimental its proxy policies have been, giving rise to our own Taliban movement, which has engaged our security forces in a protracted war against the state and citizenry. Like with every attempt at dialogue, there will always be detractors and spoilers. There are many stakeholders when it comes to such a protracted conflict: Taliban factions against the talks, those who just do not believe that any good can come of talking to the militants and Afghan government members who believe Pakistan and the Taliban can never be sincere given history. But where there is hope, there is always a way and there have been too many casualties in the war-torn theatre of Afghanistan for a democratically elected president not to do all he can to find some semblance of peace.
pk.shafaqna.com
