No military solution to Afghan war: Abbasi
new york — Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi has warned that little progress towards ending the long-running conflict in Afghanistan would be made until all sides entered into peace talks, saying there was no military solution.
The prime minister, in an interview with Bloomberg, voiced scepticism over US President Donald Trump’s increase in troops to assist the Afghan security forces and said Islamabad was ready to help mediate talks with the Taleban.
“At the end of the day the Afghans have to sit down and talk,” Prime Minister Abbasi said in the interview released on Monday.
Abbasi rejected charges that Pakistan had been selective in its fight against terrorism. Following an announcement last week that 27 Taleban and Haqqani network insurgents had been handed over to Afghanistan in November in a what Abbasi described as a “routine” prisoner transfer. He said there was no evidence Pakistan was backing militants fighting across the border after a spate of violence left hundreds dead and wounded in Kabul last month.
“These are Afghan nationals, who were arrested inside Pakistan, they were not involved in a terror attack on us otherwise we would have prosecuted them here, so we handed them back to the Afghans,” the prime minister said.
US military funding was already “very minimal,” Abbasi said, noting Pakistan was still owed billions of dollars in reimbursements from the Coalition Support Fund. However, he said, Pakistan was not considering closing the US supply routes into Afghanistan.
Abbasi said talks and intelligence cooperation was still ongoing and that a growing relationship with China should not stop that.
“They are not mutually exclusive relationships and nobody wants it that way either,” Abbasi said. “China is more of a longer term, a deeper relationship, the US is probably more transactional.” In the last two-to-three months Pakistan has “more or less complied” with sanctions against the Falah-i-Insaniat Foundation and Jamaat-ud Dawa, an alleged front for banned militant outfit Lashkar-e-Taiba, Prime Minister Abbasi said.