The fifth meeting of the Quadrilateral Crisis Group, consisting of Pakistan, China, Afghanistan and the US was doomed to failure before it even started. Afghanistan decided not to send a delegation to Islamabad for the meeting, instead getting its ambassador to Pakistan to represent them. This was a departure from the previous four summits of the QCG, where each country sent relatively high-level delegations, and is a sure sign that Afghanistan holds out little hope for multilateral diplomacy. That the meeting was held in Pakistan may have further convinced Afghanistan to treat it as an afterthought since relations between the two countries are at a particularly low ebb these days. Afghanistan blames us for facilitating attacks by the Taliban in their country by refusing to take action against them and their allies, like the Haqqani Network. Since the role of the QCG is to facilitate peace talks between Afghanistan and the Taliban, the differences between Afghanistan and Pakistan have made any chance of a breakthrough virtually nil. And so it proved, with the meeting concluding with a rote condemnation of violence but no news of any progress. The Afghan government knows that it cannot militarily defeat the Taliban but, for now, it also wants to scapegoat Pakistan for its failures rather than accept responsibility and move forward constructively.
The stance of the Afghan government is even odder given it just inked a draft agreement with the Hizb-e-Islami militant group led by former Afghan prime minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. His group not only has links with Al-Qaeda but he has also been branded a global terrorist by the US. Under the terms of this draft agreement, the group’s members will be given amnesty and recognised as an official party while the Afghan government will also lobby the UN to have it removed from all blacklists. It is unclear what the Afghan government gets in return since the Hizb-e-Islami has played barely any role in the Taliban insurgency. So this agreement will neither lead to a reduction in violence nor bring the Taliban to the negotiating table. Meanwhile, as Pakistan keeps pointing out, TTP chief Mullah Fazlullah is based in Afghanistan and nothing is being done to hunt him down. Cooperation must be a two-way street and right now neither side is willing to make the first gesture towards reconciliation. Till then, the QCG meetings, though they should continue to keep the channels of communication open, will have little impact in bringing peace to Afghanistan.http://www.thenews.com.pk/print/121299-Dwindling-talks
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