Reuters says Taliban met US envoy in Islamabad – Newspaper

ISLAMABAD: A Taliban delegation met Thursday with the US special representative for Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, two sources said Reuters, the first known contact between the two parties since President Donald Trump suspended the talks last month.

President Trump halted the talks, which pointed to a plan to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan in exchange for Taliban security guarantees, after the death of an American soldier and another 11 in a Taliban bomb attack in Kabul.

However, the sources warned that the meeting in Islamabad, which lasted more than an hour, did not represent the resumption of formal negotiations.

"The Taliban officials held a meeting with Zalmay Khalilzad … all I can say is that Pakistan played an important role in convincing them of how important it was for the peace process," said a senior official from Pakistan. Reuters, but refused to be identified as he was not authorized to speak in public.

He said that the meeting, which was confirmed by a second source, did not involve formal negotiations on the peace process, but aimed to build trust. He declined to give more details about the discussions.

The U.S. Embassy in Islamabad and the State Department in Washington declined to comment if there was a meeting.

A State Department representative said that Ambassador Khalilzad had spent several days in Islamabad this week to consult with the authorities in Pakistan, but that his meetings did not represent a restart of the Afghan peace process.

Zabihullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman, did not confirm or deny that the Taliban had met with Khalilzad, saying the Taliban delegation was still in Islamabad to meet on Friday.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a Taliban leader in Afghanistan said the delegation's visit to Pakistan was intended to revive the negotiations and end the 18-year war.

A spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Pakistan did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The US government told Kabul that Ambassador Khalilzad planned to meet with the Taliban in Islamabad, an important source from the Afghan government said.

However, Afghan officials were told that the meeting was to discuss the kidnapping in 2016 of two university professors, the American Kevin King and the Australian Timothy Weeks, in Kabul by the Haqqani network affiliated with the Taliban.

The source said the Afghan government, led by President Ashraf Ghani, did not want the peace process to resume unless it was led by Afghans. Ghani has complained bitterly that the Taliban have excluded his administration from the previous talks.

The Taliban delegation led by Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, one of the group's founders, met Thursday with Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi, and both sides called for talks to resume as soon as possible.

The video of Pakistan's warm welcome for the Taliban this week circulated on media sites, and Afghans bristled on social media before images of Taliban and Pakistani officials exchanging hugs and smiles.

The United States has long considered that Pakistan's cooperation is crucial to ending the war in Afghanistan. The latest events follow a meeting last week between President Trump and Prime Minister Imran Khan on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

The United States and the Taliban said last month, shortly before the talks were interrupted, that they were close to reaching an agreement, despite concerns among some US security officials and the Afghan government that a withdrawal of the The United States could generate more conflicts and a resurgence of militant factions. .

Posted on Dawn, October 5, 2019