Pakistan-Taliban meet irks Afghanistan, questions legitimacy of meet

Afghanistan government lambasted Pakistan for hosting the Taliban in Islamabad on Thursday, to review the broken peace talks with the United States, according to sources. 

Republic sources confirmed that Afghanistan questioned the legitimacy of the Pakistan-Taliban meet, further stating that it is the Afghan people who would decide the peace of their country, not others. Taliban has unleashed bloody violence in the country to bring obstacles in the democratic election process, thus causing more casualties in August than war-torn Syria and Yemen combined.

Laying bare Pakistan's hypocrisy on the Taliban, Afghanistan even called the meeting between Islamabad and an armed terror group, a failed pattern. Taliban has also agreed to meet with US special envoy to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad, who is currently in Pakistan. 

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Taliban delegation in Pakistan

Top leaders of the militant met with Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi with the view to revive the "dead" talks between the US and Taliban to end the 18-year-old war. The Foreign Office said in a statement that a delegation of the Taliban Political Commission (TPC) called on Qureshi.

Qureshi noted that the existing, broad regional and international consensus for achieving peace in Afghanistan at the earliest provided an unprecedented opportunity that must not be lost. Reiterating Pakistan's backing for all efforts to achieve "permanent peace" in Afghanistan. 

Pakistan Foreign Minister said all these years Pakistan has also kept reminding the world not to overlook the hardcore political, economic, socio-cultural and ethnic ground realities in Afghanistan and its immediate neighborhood.

Pakistan uses Taliban to counter India

Since the inception of the Taliban in 1994, Pakistan's Foreign Policy in Afghanistan has been in favour of the Taliban, who also considers the militant group as the Afghan representative, instead of the government. 

Islamabad policy towards Taliban has been motivated to counter New Delhi's influence in Afghanistan. According to documents released by Julian Assange's WikiLeaks from the hacked personal email account of former CIA director John Brennan, it was confirmed that Pakistan uses terrorists as proxies to counter India's growing influence in Kabul. 

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Brennan, three days after Barack Obama was elected US President in November 2008, wrote to him in a position-cum- strategy paper that Pakistan uses the Taliban to counter India in Afghanistan.

"Pakistan's desire to counter India's growing influence in Afghanistan and concerns about US long-term commitments to Afghanistan increase Pakistan's interest in hedging its bets by ensuring that it will be able to have a working relationship with the Taliban to balance Indian and Iranian interests if the US withdraws," Brennan wrote on November 7 in 2008.