Pakistan’s absence in Bonn conference won’t make a difference: Kabul

Afghanistan says meeting will go ahead as planned.

As the parliamentary committee on national security endorsed on Friday the federal cabinet’s decision of not attending the Bonn Conference on Afghanistan, a spokesman for Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Islamabad’s boycott would have no negative impact, Tolonews reported.

The conference will go ahead as planned and the international community will discuss their commitments to Afghanistan beyond 2014, Karzai’s spokesman Emal Faizi said.

Pakistan had always said it was part of the solution of Afghan problems, Faizi said, adding if that really was Pakistan’s stance, then it should understand the importance of its participation in the conference.

However, he reiterated, if Pakistan doesn’t attend, it won’t make a difference.

“Pakistan has decided not to attend. I once again stress that this will have no negative impact, as the agenda of the conference is fully focused on Afghanistan’s future,” Faizi said.

“Of course a part of the agenda will focus on peace talks with anti-government armed groups, and if Pakistan wants to play a role, the conference will give it a chance,” Faizi added.

‘Karzai offered to protect Taliban from ISI’

While quarters in Afghanistan play down the importance of Pakistan’s attendance at the Bonn Conference, Karzai, in a failed attempt to find peace partners free from the influence of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), offered Taliban leaders living in Pakistan resettlement packages for their families, The Guardian revealed.

Quoting Afghan officials, The Guardian reported that the Afghan president’s effort to find representatives to talk for the insurgents were scuppered by their unwillingness to jeopardise families given sanctuary in Pakistan, where they claim to live under the sway of the ISI.

The initiative shows the desire of Karzai’s government to peel away a faction within the Quetta Shura, the report said.

A diplomat in Kabul said families of high-ranking Taliban are often moved around Pakistan against their will and live under a loose house arrest. To overcome the problem the Afghan government, with Nato backing, hatched secret plans to move entire families to protected areas in Afghanistan.

“Such an operation would be difficult but not impossible,” said a senior Afghan government official who did not wish to be named. “We have a red line on allowing our security forces to conduct operations inside Pakistan, but we were prepared to move the families. It would not have been a James Bond-style operation. We would have just used a few henchmen.”

The effort never came to anything though, he said, and the most recent offers to move families are on hold after the assassination of Karzai’s peace envoy Burhanuddin Rabbani. After Rabbani’s death in September the Afghan president abandoned efforts to talk to the Taliban, saying he would engage directly with Pakistan.

Foreign experts and Afghan officials say the issue of families is a big stumbling block to peace efforts, giving the ISI an iron grip over the Taliban. “Every Taliban commander has his family in Pakistan,” alleged a former Afghan official who has met the insurgents’ representatives in the past.

He said the ISI tried to ensure all high-ranking Taliban kept their families in Pakistan.

“It is a deliberate policy of the ISI, who cannot trust people to fight unless they bring their family to Pakistan,” the official claimed. Published in The Express Tribune, December 3^rd, 2011.