Will visit Pakistan if PM Imran extends invitation: Taliban

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DOHA/WASHINGTON: The Afghan Taliban said on Thursday they were willing to visit Pakistan and meet Prime Minister Imran Khan if they were extended a formal invitation.The Taliban’s announcement comes in response to Prime Minister Imran Khan’s statement during his recent visit to Washington, where he had said he would meet the Taliban and convince them for a meeting with the Afghan government.“We want peace in Afghanistan, Pakistan will do everything to help the Taliban come on the dialogue table so that there is peace,” Khan had said.Speaking to BBC Pashto via telephone from Doha, Afghan Taliban spokesperson Sohail Shaheen said they would visit Pakistan if formally invited. “We often visit regional countries and would surely go there because Pakistan is our neighbour and Muslim country,” he was quoted as saying.Peace in Afghanistan dominated the discussion during Prime Minister Imran Khan’s maiden official visit to the United States, where President Donald Trump hosted him at the White House. Trump hailed Pakistan’s support in achieving peace in neighbouring war-torn Afghanistan.—News DeskAFP adds: The United States and Afghanistan said on Thursday they had agreed to accelerate efforts to reach a negotiated end to the conflict in the war-ravaged country.In a joint statement, Washington and Kabul said the agreement had been reached in a telephone call between US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani on Wednesday.Ghani had asked for clarifications following President Donald Trump’s remark that the United States could easily win the war in Afghanistan but didn’t “want to kill 10 million people.”Pompeo assured Ghani that “there has been no change to President Trump’s South Asia strategy, including US commitment to a conditions-based drawdown” of troops, the statement said.It said Pompeo and Ghani had agreed that “now is the time to accelerate efforts to reach a negotiated end to the war in Afghanistan.” General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Washington’s special envoy for Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, had been sent to Kabul to “discuss in detail the next steps on the road to peace,” the statement said.Khalilzad is then expected to head to Doha to resume talks with the Taliban. He has held several meetings with the Islamist militants in the past year, the most recent being on July 9, also in Doha. But the major hurdle has so far been the Taliban’s refusal to negotiate directly with the Afghan government.http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/com/cwEr/~4/10VzllHiAL4

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