The United States is trying to secure the help of Pakistani intelligence service to organise reconciliation talks in Afghanistan aimed at ending the war there, The New York Times reported Monday. The newspaper said overtures are taking place just a month after President Barack Obama's administration accused Pakistan's spy agency of secretly supporting the Haqqani terrorist network.
The revamped approach, which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has called "Fight, Talk, Build," combines continued US air and ground strikes against the Haqqani network and the Taliban with an insistence that Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency get them to the negotiating table, the report said.
Top US officials including Clinton visited Pakistan this month to press for action against Islamic extremists, particularly the Haqqani network, which is blamed for anti-US attacks in Afghanistan. But some elements of the ISI see little advantage in forcing those negotiations, because they see the insurgents as perhaps their best bet for maintaining influence in Afghanistan, the paper noted.
The efforts at brokering a deal with militants come as early hopes in the White House about having the outlines of a deal ready in time for a multinational conference on Afghanistan on December 5 in Bonn, Germany, have been all but abandoned, The Times noted. Even inside the Obama administration, the new initiative has been met with deep scepticism, in part because the Pakistani government has developed its own strategy, the paper pointed out. One senior US official summarised the Pakistani position as "Cease-fire, Talk, Wait for the Americans to Leave."
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