Peace in Afghanistan

Pakistani authorities on Wednesday freed eight to 10 Afghan Taliban prisoners at the request of peace negotiators to help boost the troubled peace and reconciliation process in war-torn Afghanistan. All junior cadres of the Taliban, they were freed on a request by Afghan High Peace Council chief Salahuddin Rabbani, who arrived in Islamabad at the head of a delegation on Monday for talks with Pakistan's top civil and military leadership as Islamabad showed its determination to play a positive role in the reconciliation process that made little headway since it began almost four years ago. A joint statement issued at the conclusion of Rabbani's visit said a number of Taliban detainees are being released in support of the reconciliation process. The two sides also argued with the Taliban and other armed groups that they should sever all links with al Qaeda and other international terror networks. The Taliban's former deputy leader, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, captured by Pakistani security forces in Karachi in 2010, was not among the released prisoners because he initiated peace talks without informing Pakistani authorities. The joint statement said that Pakistan and Afghanistan would work closely with international partners to remove the names of potential negotiators amongst the Taliban and other groups from the United Nations sanctions list to enable them to participate in talks to ease out the transition in Afghanistan in the run-up to the withdrawal of most of the US and foreign troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2014. The Afghanistan side has been pleading that the release of Taliban prisoners will benefit Afghanistan and Taliban are supposed to divorce their bloody past to begin a normal life and reintegrate into Afghan society. Their release came after substantial progress in the talks between the Afghan council and Pakistani leaders, particularly on confidence building measures between the two countries which have often shown their interest in the peace process degenerating in the past. Taliban are now being billed as a potential political and electoral force for the 2014 Afghan polls by Kabul and Washington and this position was taken by Islamabad in not so distant a past only to be spurned by both Afghanistan and the US. The AHPC now admits that Kabul can depend on Pakistan's commitment, as held out by top Pakistani leaders that Islamabad would go to the last extent of restoring a sustainable peace by extending all out cooperation and coordination to realize the goal. Such notions also came from the former Taliban Minister, Maulvi Arsala Rahmani, now a member of Afghanistan's High Peace Council, who has said that Taliban have now decided to soften up their stance for a peace in Afghanistan. Today, they are ready to make comprises on some of the aspects which one could never thought of earlier. Rahmani also pointed out to a new role of Taliban with a categorical assurance that "Taliban are not back to govern the same way as the old Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. When they are back, they will be back as (other) Afghans." With the opening of a Taliban office in Qatar, one could see this change in the attitude of the Taliban leadership. On its part, United States is also negotiating with Taliban considering them as a legal entity. The US official stance a few months earlier was that they would never talk with Al-Qaeda and Taliban. Then there came a change of stance and its officials said that, US is willing to talk to "good" Taliban. However, now that US officials have met with the people of Mullah Omar whom they were accounting for as "bad" Taliban, there is a visible flexibility on the US side, which is no longer insisting either that the Taliban accept the existing constitution as a pre-condition or disarm them, before the talks. Now that all actors of the Afghanistan peace process have softened their hitherto inflexible conduct, there is a strong message from all sides that they wanted business. The scenario also sends a signal that Kabul and Washington have now accepted Islamabad's view that peace without Taliban, who hail from Pashtuns who form about half of the landlocked country's population, will be a mere delusion. It is also a stark reality that there can no peace in Afghanistan without Pakistan's active participation.