Taliban leaders advise officials on Kabul talks

ISLAMABAD — Three senior Taliban members traveled to Pakistan last week and held a series of meetings with officials in Islamabad, mainly to brief them about the recent talks held in Qatar between the Taliban and Kabul, a senior Taliban official, an Afghan diplomat and a Pakistani official said Saturday.

The Afghan ambassador to Pakistan, Hazrat Omar Zakhilwal, said he was aware of the meetings but refused to offer details. “We know about these recent meetings but we don’t know what was discussed between the Taliban and Pakistani officials,” he said.

According to a senior Taliban official, the Taliban who were sent to Pakistan were Mullah Salam Hanifi and Mullah Jan Mohammed, both former ministers in the Taliban government, and Maulvi Shahabuddin Dilawar, a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

A senior Pakistani security official confirmed the latest meetings between the Taliban and Pakistani authorities, saying Islamabad is playing its role to ensure peace in neighboring Afghanistan. Pakistan has repeatedly said it will support any effort aimed at bring peace in Afghanistan.

“We will keep making efforts to facilitate talks between Kabul and the Taliban, as we did in July 2015, but the world knows who scuttled the peace process at the time and we do not want to discuss those bitter things,” said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Pakistan arranged the first ever face-to-face talks between Kabul and the Taliban in 2015, but the peace process broke down after the Afghan government announced the death years earlier of Taliban founder and leader Mullah Mohammed Omar.

In the time since, a leadership struggle within the Taliban’s ranks broke into the open and Omar’s successor was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Pakistan. The latest development came after Taliban and Afghan government officials held new secret talks in Qatar aimed at restarting peace negotiations to end the country’s long war.

Pakistan was not involved in the talks and the Taliban said Pakistan was not aware of them until they were over.

Osama Faisal / Associated Press 2013 The Taliban maintain this office in Doha, Qatar, where talks recently took place between the militants and officials from Afghanistan.