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Afghan peace talks may resume after April

Pakistan sees a chance to resume stalled peace talks that aim to end the long conflict in Afghanistan if Taleban militants are willing to engage with the Afghan government once President Hamid Karzai steps down, Sartaj Aziz, adviser to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on national security and foreign affairs said on Tuesday.

“My own feeling is that after the election the Taleban will probably talk to the new government more than the present government,” Sartaj said in Washington.

“So one should hope that before 2014 ends some kind of dialogue will be going on,” Sartaj 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 Taleban, which have appeared to be frozen since the summer, as a condition for allowing US 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 US 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 US-backed effort to get peace talks going in earnest has been the Taleban’s reluctance to engage in direct talks with the Karzai government and Karzai’s insistence that his government take part. Sartaj said the government had no objections to allowing a senior former Taleban leader to facilitate renewed peace talks, possibly by permitting him to travel to a third country.