3:21 AM
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan is willing to do whatever the Afghans want to help facilitate an end to 10 years of war with the Taliban, Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar told reporters on Thursday.
Speaking a day after talks with President Hamid Karzai in Kabul billed as a fence-mending visit designed to ease frosty ties, Khar sought to refute perceptions that Islamabad was an obstacle to peace.
“We’re willing to do whatever the Afghans want or expect,” Khar told reporters when asked whether Pakistan was ready to push the Haqqani network towards peace negotiations, but stopped short of naming the group or commenting further.
She said an effective peace process was still “miles away” but that the process should be “Afghan-led, Afghan-owned, Afghan-driven”.
“Once the Afghan people decide the way forward, whatever assistance Pakistan can give, it will give,” she said.
Khar arrived in Kabul on a one-day visit on Wednesday to hold talks with her Afghan counterpart, which aimed at thawing frosty ties between the two neighbours.
Pakistan signals imminent end to NATO blockade
Pakistan signalled that it could shortly end a more than two-month blockade on Nato supplies entering Afghanistan for foreign forces.
Khar told reporters that parliament, tasked with adopting the review, would “hopefully” meet next week.
“I cannot pre-empt what the parliament is going to decide but I would assume that should not be so much of a problem,” she said when asked if the recommendations would include re-opening the border.
Responding as to when parliament would pass the review, she said: “I’m going to hopefully ensure and push it very hard that it is no later than within a week… first half of February is probable.”
Islamabad rejects any blame for the November strikes, which brought its relationship with the United States and Nato to an all-time low.
When the route eventually re-opens, it is widely expected to tax Nato convoys carrying supplies shipped to its port in Karachi and trucked through its territory to landlocked Afghanistan.
The United States has made increasing use of alternative routes into Afghanistan through the north in order to mitigate against losses in Pakistan.
The Nato supply routes were shut in the aftermath of air strikes that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers on November 26, in what Nato and the US military later blamed on a series of mistakes by both sides.
Posted in: NATIONAL
