Pakistan\u2019s Foreign Ministry said it is ready to continue talks with the Taliban administration, but the main condition for the negotiations is the effective containment of security threats and terrorist groups based on Afghan soil.<\/p>\n
Sajjad Haider Khan, the ministry\u2019s spokesman, said at a news conference on Friday that negotiations would not be productive unless the Taliban acknowledge the presence of more than 20 terrorist groups in Afghanistan and create an effective mechanism to prevent cross-border threats.<\/p>\n
Citing reports by the United Nations and SIGAR, he added that the unchecked activities of these groups do not only threaten Pakistan\u2019s security, but have also put countries such as China, Uzbekistan and Iran at risk. Haider Khan also said that more than 1,300 Pakistani citizens have died over the past year because of a rise in terrorist attacks.<\/p>\n
Referring to Islamabad\u2019s repeated efforts since 2021 to engage the Taliban through bilateral meetings and multilateral formats, including the Moscow, Qatar and Turkey formats, the Foreign Ministry spokesman said these talks had gone nowhere because of the Taliban\u2019s \u201clack of flexibility.\u201d He also pointed to disagreements between the Taliban and Pakistan at the eighth Moscow format meeting, which ended without adopting a joint statement.<\/p>\n
In response to these remarks, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid rejected Pakistan\u2019s allegations and stressed that the Taliban has neither the capacity nor the intention to support or interfere in Pakistan\u2019s insecurity. Mujahid said insecurity in Pakistan is detrimental to Afghanistan and that the group does not support it.<\/p>\n
It should be noted that the Taliban administration has repeatedly denied the existence and activity of armed groups on Afghan soil seeking to threaten neighbouring countries. At the same time, Pakistan has said that if the Taliban provide the necessary cooperation in curbing these groups, Islamabad is ready to reopen the borders and resume trade with Afghanistan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Pakistan says talks with the Taliban depend on action against militant groups and cross-border security threats from Afghanistan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":24561,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-important-news","category-international"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24562","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24562"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24562\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24561"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}