THERE appears to be an understanding of what needs to be done but no clarity on how to achieve it.

The first quadrilateral meeting on Afghanistan has ended with a public emphasis on the urgent need for direct talks between the Afghan government and the Afghan Taliban — a sensible and welcome emphasis that is clearly the only way ahead for a political settlement in that country.

Yet, there are clearly continuing differences over how to make talks happen immediately because, for all the emphasis on urgency, the representatives of Pakistan, Afghanistan, the US and China were unable to announce anything other than a second quadrilateral meeting next week.

From the public statements and what officials have claimed privately, there appear to be at least two sticking points.

Firstly, the Afghan government is apparently demanding that action, military or otherwise, be taken against Taliban elements that it has deemed irreconcilable. However, as the foreign affairs adviser, Sartaj Aziz, has suggested, it is problematic to impose preconditions and demand action against particular Taliban factions even before the talks kick off.

Presumably, the Afghan government hopes that cracking down on the so-called irreconcilables will reduce violence inside Afghanistan, while simultaneously sending a message to other factions that talks are the only viable option left.

Yet, given the fluid situation that the Taliban have found themselves in — the leadership of Mullah Mansour still appears to be contested and it is not clear which factions will emerge victorious in the intra-Taliban struggles — using force to shape the pecking order among the Taliban could be counterproductive.

From a Pakistani security standpoint, military or police action against Taliban factions could also trigger a domestic militancy backlash, a factor that simply should not be discounted in order to pursue foreign policy goals.

Perhaps the sensible middle ground could lie in more urgent efforts on border management, thereby partly addressing both sides’ concerns about sanctuaries along the Pak-Afghan border.

Secondly, there appears to be some confusion about the state of the Taliban themselves: are they relatively united? Have they fractured?

Or are the Taliban splintering into localised groups and an unmanageable number of factions?

Reports that Pakistan may have offered the names of a number of Taliban figures with whom the Afghan government could potentially hold talks suggests that there may now be multiple power centres among the Taliban.

Quite how a coherent reconciliation process can be achieved if the Afghan government is confronted with multiple factions whose importance ebbs and flows depending on what happens on the battlefield is not readily apparent.

Ultimately, however, there is a bottom line here: the quadrilateral group has to make peace achievable before the next fighting season arrives.

A repetition of last year’s security disasters could cause the regional situation to unravel faster than any power wanting peace could react to.

Published in Dawn, January 13th, 2016