WASHINGTON: Despite a change in the Taliban leadership, the United States wants Pakistan to continue its efforts for promoting talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government, says the US State Department.

“We think the time is right for these reconciliation talks to move forward, and there’s an opportunity here,” the department’s deputy spokesperson Mark Toner told journalists in Washington.

Know more: US urges Taliban to stay engaged with Kabul

Pakistan was forced to postpone the second round of the Afghan reconciliation talks, which were to begin in Murree on Friday, after Kabul announced earlier this week that Taliban chief Mullah Omar was dead.

Asked if the US would have preferred the Pakistanis not to postpone the talks, Mr Toner said: “We think they should go forward.”

Pakistan, he said, had played a helpful role in the reconciliation process and “we want to continue to see them play that constructive role”.

The US official refused to comment on the power struggle that followed the announcement of Mullah Omar’s death, saying that he was “not going to wade into those kinds of political situations that are so fraught”.

Asked if the US believed the Islamic State movement could exploit the vacuum created by Mullah Omar’s death to infiltrate Afghanistan, Mr Toner said the United States was aware of the presence of IS-affiliated militants in Afghanistan and was monitoring very closely whether “their emergence will have any kind of meaningful or significant impact on the threat environment in the region”.

Meanwhile, the Pakistan Embassy in Washington rejected the suggestion that the Pakistani government knew where and how Mullah Omar died.

“There is no certainty about the date or place of his death. Any insinuation that he died in Pakistan or that government of Pakistan was aware of this fact is only an unfounded speculation,” the embassy’s spokesman Nadeem Hotiana said.

He pointed out that the Taliban movement released a statement on July 30, which confirmed Mullah Omar’s death, but also clarified that “Mullah Omar never left Afghanistan even for neighbouring Pakistan”.

The embassy’s clarification followed a report in The Washington Post on Thursday, claiming that the United States had long suspected Pakistan of sheltering the late Taliban leader.

Published in Dawn, August 1st, 2015

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