Bharat Rakshak

Islamabad, Feb. 1 (ANI): US Ambassador to Pakistan, Richard Olson, has said the United States is ready to open the door for talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban, adding that the Afghan Taliban could be part of Afghanistan's future if they met conditions to ensure long-term peace and stability in the war-torn country.Olson said that the end result of any process must be that the Taliban end violence, break ties with Al-Qaeda and accept Afghanistan's Constitution, and if this happens, the Taliban can be a part of Afghanistan's future, reports The Express Tribune.Olson's remarks reiterated recent American emphasis on pursuing reconciliation in Afghanistan instead of its usual method of using military might.In this context, Olson said their new office in Qatar could be used for negotiations between the Afghan High Peace Council and representatives of the Taliban.Olson also called for the US and Pakistan to work together to facilitate a negotiated peace in Afghanistan. (ANI

ramana wrote:Who is Jon Williams to hold forth on TSP and Taliban?

Acharya wrote:

RamaY wrote: At the same time, if you both were correct then India wasted $B in Afghanistan with its unnecessary non-military involvement.

This is non military and India should increase this. I also proposesed earlier that India should have its region inside AfPak and have 1 million Indian ( males) stationed inside Afgh and have few mil Indian travel to Afgh every year for the next 30 years. They should be only involed in trade, business, commerce, develpment etc

abhishek_sharma wrote:I killed people in Afghanistan. Was I right or wrong?

London: Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari and his Afghan counterpart Hamid Karzai are to hold talks called by Prime Minister David Cameron here on Monday to discuss the peace process with the focus on preventing a Taliban resurgence after the withdrawal of western troops from Afghanistan next year.

The two leaders were due to meet Mr. Cameron over dinner on Sunday which would also be attended by their Foreign Ministers and intelligence chiefs.

Downing Street said Monday’s “summit’’ would bring together key figures from both the political and security establishments of the two countries.

“Discussions are expected to focus on the Afghan-led peace process and how the Pakistanis and international community can support it. We also expect the Afghans and Pakistanis to make further progress on the Strategic Partnership Agreement they committed to in September,” said a spokesperson.

ramana wrote:Go back to Chanakya when he was student and fed honey to the kusa grass field.

Aditya_V wrote:What they don't understand is Abduls will now think USA is beatable and really go for it in US Homeland. TSP is desperately trying to divert this on India.

India’s long-standing concerns that a US military withdrawal from Afghanistan could lead to an increase in terrorist activity by the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) received some confirmation with reports of LeT cadre moving into Afghanistan for bases.

There are worrying reports of LeT
cadres moving towards Kunar and Nuristan provinces in eastern Afghanistan, looking for bases that would provide them an independent base for training and collection.

Pakistani militant groups carried out a similar strategy of being based in Afghanistan and attacking Indian Kashmir from there when the Taliban government ruled Kabul in the 1980s.

This will be the first time since a US cruise missile attacked four al Qaeda and Harkat-ul-Mujahideen terror training camps in Khost on August 20, 1998 that anti-India groups have again started to take shelter in Afghanistan.

The security ramifications of the US pullout from Afghanistan for India and the region were debated during a brainstorming session at the highest levels of the UPA government last month.

PM Manmohan Singh was particularly concerned about its fallout on the country’s internal security, particularly the situation in Kashmir.

Multi-pronged strategies were worked out to try and firewall India from pan-Islamic jihadists after the pressure from the US’s precision drone attacks and Special Forces raids eases off along the Durand Line.

There was also discussion on how to protect New Delhi’s interests in Kabul.

In October 2010, during his official visit, the then CIA director Leon Panetta had for the first time communicated to New Delhi about the movement of LeT cadres towards southern and eastern Afghanistan.

At that time, the input was noted but not considered actionable due to the lack of any substantive evidence.

India also believed that there were serious ideological differences between LeT and Taliban, with the former ascribing to the Ahle-e-Hadith school of Islam and the latter being Deobandi followers.

There was also the confessions of the LeT terrorist David Coleman Headley, the scout for the 26/11 Mumbai attack, who disclosed that the ISI did not want Hafiz Saeed’s group to be involved in Afghan operations against US troops.

Headley gave specific examples of Syed Abdur Rehman Hashim, the father of the so-called Karachi Project that was aimed at India, and the Khurram brothers, who were thrown out of the LeT after they tried to shift the terrorist organisation’s targets from the Radcliffe Line to those across the Durand.

A part of the internal security establishment still believes there can be no operational unity between LeT, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan and the Afghan Taliban due to serious ideological differences between the Punjabi and Afghan groups.

But there is now evidence that some 600 LeT cadres are seeking shelter and setting up bases just across from the Pakistan border, well inside Taliban territory.

After increasing electronic and spatial evidence, India’s counterterror experts believe that pressure from the ISI, combined with generous funding, have led both sides to override their theological differences for the time being.

The assessment of India’s intelligence agencies is that the LeT will once again try to target Kashmir as the US walks out of Afghanistan next year.

“This move will give the Pakistan state much needed deniability from Lashkar strikes in India as well as give strategic option to their handlers to either push towards Kabul in order to destabilise the government in power or hit at India. After the foreign forces have left, these groups will only fight to implement sharia in Afghanistan. India will again become a frontline state,” said a senior official.

New Delhi has already sensitised key players like the US, Afghanistan, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Tajikistan about its concerns.

It has noted with concern how Western powers seem to once again be going soft on Pakistan’s sponsorship of terror groups, presumably in return for support for the attempts at rapprochement between the Taliban and the Hamid Karzai government.

Even though a relative newcomer into the Afghan game, China is also worried about jihadists crossing into its Xinjiang-Uighur region through Afghanistan’s Wakhan corridor.

New Delhi has asked Saudi Arabia to make efforts to delegitimise violence in the name of Islam.

“As a custodian of the two Holy Mosques, Saudi Arabian government should make efforts to stop radicalisation of youth through internet and engage them to give the correct interpretation of Islam through either a website or dialogue with the clerics... or else every suicide bomber would continue dreaming about the virgins in heaven,” said a senior official.

Seeing the Saudis as a major influence in the AfPak region, New Delhi is using its new found closeness with Riyadh to pitch for peace in Kabul and weed out radicalisation in the region.

India worries that it will see a return to the state of play before 2001. The US Afghan pullout will take place at the same time as the J&K assembly elections in 2014. With US drone strikes dropping off and US soldiers no longer on the ground, militants could return to their traditional battleground: Kashmir and the Line of Control.

With less than two years to go before the pullout, New Delhi plans to push for a new political initiative in the Valley and has ordered the Indian Army to keep temperatures along the LoC at a low level

US in contact with Taliban representatives in Qatar: Reports
Thu Feb 7, 2013 2:27PM
Afghan media reports say the United States is in contact with the Taliban in Qatar to persuade the militant group to sit at the negotiating table with the Afghan government.


The talks are aimed at pushing the Taliban toward a negotiated agreement with Kabul as Washington tries to prepare the ground for the withdrawal of its troops from Afghanistan, Weesa daily cited political analyst, Vahid Mojdeh, as saying.

The US-Taliban talks formally started in January 2012, but the militants left the negotiating table in March, citing Washington’s failure to fulfill the conditions for peace negotiations to proceed.

On Monday, Karzai, British Prime Minister David Cameron and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari concluded trilateral talks held in London and vowed to work to reach a peace deal within six months.

In a statement, the leaders also voiced support for the opening of an office in the Qatari capital, Doha, for the Taliban to hold talks. They also urged the militants to join the reconciliation process in Afghanistan.

Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid, however, on Wednesday dismissed the London talks and said the conference and other “horse trading” were “the real obstacles of effective and fruitful negotiations between the factual sides.”

The Taliban have repeatedly refused to negotiate directly with the Western-backed government of President Hamid Karzai, demanding that any negotiations be held between the militants and the United States.

Meanwhile, Karzai and Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg have inked an agreement on strategic partnership between Norway and Afghanistan.

Under the deal signed on Tuesday, Norway will continue to provide development assistance, and the Afghan authorities will intensify their efforts in the areas of human rights, women’s rights, improving governance and combating corruption.

shyamd wrote:Outgoing US Commander in #Afghanistan says zero option for troops 2014+ "not feasible. John Allen tells #BBC suggestion "not on the table."

ramana wrote:On the contray it means they want a small presence in Afghanistan post 2014. It means balckwill Plan B in effect.

ramana wrote:On the other hand it means they want to protect the TSP from India entering Kabul.

RajeshA, This smacks of Eudemus being left as a satrap after Alexander's retreat.

nvishal wrote:@RoyG
You're looking at the islamists as one single entity but they aren't. The PA, the pakistani taliban and the afghan taliban have a common enemy(the united states) but in the absence of the americans, the two locals re-initiate hegemonic ambitions against each other.

Post american withdrawal, the civilian afghan govt will remain and they will continue to be boosted.

My assumption is that the civilian govt will be able to buy and incorporate the afghan fighters within them and this is going to leave the pakistanis without any exploit. Expect increased shelling incidents on afghan-pakistani borders.

New Delhi’s Press Enclave Road represents the city’s complex mix of communities like no other: One side boasts an enormous modern shopping mall featuring the Hard Rock Cafe and Zara; the other, a string of eateries advertising Afghan rice dishes and chemist signs in Dari, one of Afghanistan’s main languages.It is a sign of the impact of the city’s newest migrant community one block away from one of Delhi’s largest private hospitals, Max. The hospital, like others in the capital, is finding a new market in medical tourism from the war-torn neighbor.The city already has a sizeable Afghan community – long-term residents, refugees, students – but over the past five years a steady trickle of visitors seeking healthcare has grown into a flood. Now, some large hospitals catering to foreign patients are finding that up to a third of them are from Afghanistan.
Some are catering almost exclusively to Afghans, while others are working to make their services more accessible to the community. The colossal Apollo Hospital in the city’s southwest has translators on staff, a website in Dari, and even a separate payment desk for Afghans."All the good doctors in Afghanistan have migrated, nobody wants to invest there," says Dheerendra Singh Tomar, an Indian who runs a private hospital in Delhi catering to patients from Afghanistan and other developing countries. "Medical tourism from Afghanistan is bringing a lot of money to India.”One of these is Ziyarmal Arass, who came to the city a year ago for in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment along with his wife, and stayed on for the recent birth of his baby girl. “India is a good place for this, it’s not as expensive as other countries and Pakistan’s health care is not good,” says the 25-year-old Kabul businessman. “I was nervous about coming to Delhi but when I arrived I found many other Afghans in my neighborhood, good food and weather.”With the cost of IVF treatment in an upscale hospital costing as much as $3,000, it is clearly only a real option for Afghanistan’s upper income earners. The per capital GDP in Afghanistan is $589 compared with India’s $1,514.