US seeks Pak-Afghan reconciliation

US seeks Pak-Afghan reconciliation

Detached twins to reconcile:

WASHINGTON: ‘Detached twins’ Afghanistan and Pakistan will join other regional and international players on July 20 in Kabul to work out a plan for stabilising the war-ravaged country, says US special envoy Richard Holbrooke. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will attend the conference and the United States expects Pakistan to send either President Asif Ali Zardari or Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani. “You can’t succeed in one unless you succeed in both,” said Mr Holbrooke who told a briefing in Washington that the United States also had mended its relations with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. “There was a period where the waters got roiled a little bit, but that period is over,” he said while describing the Obama administration’s relations with the Karzai government.

President Karzai will visit Washington from May 10 to 14 and soon afterward will hold a peace jirga in Kabul for outlining the contours of a reconciliation offer to the Taliban.

Mr Holbrooke said the Kabul conference would be an affirmation of international support for the Afghan government and would replace a meeting of foreign ministers originally set for late May.

The US effort for mustering international support for the Karzai government contrasts sharply with its earlier retaliatory statements against Mr Karzai who at one stage threatened to join the Taliban if he didn’t get to control an election monitoring cell.

Since the Kabul conference will follow the jirga, the Afghan government is expected to come to the meeting with a blueprint for a future set-up. This may include some Taliban leaders as well.

But it is not clear if the new arrangement will protect Pakistan’s interests as well or it will reflect the Indian desire to continue to keep Islamabad out of Afghanistan.

Mr Holbrooke said the United States had made “enormous strides” in persuading Afghanistan and Pakistan to “work together more closely” but the two ‘detached twins’ still had their differences.

“I think everybody agrees that there’s been improvement in that particular area but that’s improvement from a very low base,” he said, adding that the relationship between Pakistan and Afghanistan was “still not where you’d want it to be”.

Although the two countries need each other to defeat terrorism; “they’re so different in every sense, including our relationship with them”, said the US envoy. “And the management of the inter-relationship is why we created the trilateral framework and why we want to resume it this summer.”

Mr Holbrooke conceded that others had legitimate interests in Afghanistan too, such as China and the three “stans” who shared their borders with Afghanistan.

Other actors in the Afghan game include Iran as well as states that do not border Afghanistan — all the way from the Gulf to India, Russia and the United States, he said.

“This is what makes Afghanistan so extraordinarily important and complex,” said the US diplomat.

While conceding the importance of each of these actors in determining Afghanistan’s future, Mr Holbrooke pointed out that Kabul and Islamabad were still the two key players and that’s why the Obama administration was working so hard to improve their ties.

According to him, there will be another trilateral meeting of the United States, Pakistan and Afghanistan before the international conference. The last such meeting was held on May 6 and 7 last year.

“We had two trilateral meetings in the first few months of last year. Then we did bilaterals first with the Pakistanis, the Strategic Dialogue last month, and now upcoming with the Afghans. Then they go through their processes, they hold a conference, and then we go back to the trilateral,” said Mr Holbrooke while underlining US efforts to improve relations between Islamabad and Kabul.

“There is a real choreography involved here,” he concluded.