WASHINGTON, Oct 28: Pakistan will have an important role to play in 'separating the good Taliban from the bad ones' and bringing them to the Afghan government, United States Ambassador to Kabul Zalmay Khalilzad said on Wednesday.

Speaking at a meeting at the Johns Hopkins University, Mr Khalilzad said reconciliation with the 'good' Taliban would be "the first agenda item in the first 180 days" of the new administration in Kabul.

The comments, coming on the day an international commission in Kabul announced President Hamid Karzai's victory in the presidential election, confirm media speculations that both Afghan and US administrations are trying to woo those Taliban supporters who are willing to disown their past.

They also confirm reports that Pakistan is cooperating with the Afghan and US governments in bringing the so-called good Taliban to Kabul's fold.

"I think that there has to be a balance between accountability and reconciliation," said the US ambassador while explaining how he thought some Taliban supporters could find a place in the new setup in Afghanistan.

He said those who had committed crimes against the Afghan people and supported terror from the Taliban needed to be brought to justice.

"But, on the other hand, there may be a lot of individuals who were part of the Taliban movement who have recognized the error of their ways, would like to support the Afghan constitution ... they need to be accommodated," he said.

Such people, he said, now wanted to support the new political order in Afghanistan and to go back and live in peace in their areas.

The Kabul government, he said, was working on a balanced approach, preparing a list of those who must be brought to justice and making an "exact formula" for those who could be accommodated in new Afghanistan.

"Whether you take a top-down approach or a bottom-up approach, Pakistan will have an important role in this regard to play as well," said Mr Khalilzad.

In the medium and long term, he said, the new Afghan government would face several key challenges. The first of those, according to him, is to "finish off the Taliban and other armed violent opposition."

Mr Khalilzad acknowledged that Pakistan hade played "a positive role in the immediate run-up to the Afghan election."

He said Afghanistan and its friends "must learn the right political and military lessons" from the failure of the Taliban's and others' attempts to disrupt the election "and must use this knowledge to end the problem of Talibanism, which requires Pakistani cooperation."

The second most important task before the new government was to rebuild Afghanistan's economy, he said. For this, he said, "a prosperous legal agriculture will need to supplant the opium market."

This year, Afghanistan is believed to have had a bumper opium crop and the current reconstruction boom in Kabul and Kandahar is attributed to drug money.

The US and Britain, he said, were assisting the Afghan government in striking narcotics labs, eradicating opium crops and arresting drug kingpins.

He said South and Central Asia had been artificially fragmented by the politics of the 20th century: the establishment of the Soviet Union, the Cold War, the Pakistan-India conflict, the Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Those events, he said, sundered east-west and north-south lines of trade and communications, which were vital for Afghanistan's economy. "These divisions are now being overcome," he said.

Mr Khalilzad said gains from trade would also be beneficial to the prosperity and stability of Afghanistan's neighbours, particularly Pakistan and Uzbekistan. As the regional markets took shape, countries that had sought to pursue their national interests in Afghanistan and the region through geopolitical competition and proxy warfare would see that the logic of the old game was increasingly obsolete, he said and added: "And in this new era, neighbours could pursue their national interests through commerce and trade."

The US ambassador said support from Afghan refugees in Pakistan and Iran helped Mr Karzai win.

Mr Karzai, he said, did extremely well in the Pukhtun areas but he also did well in areas dominated by Tajiks, Azeris and other communities in Afghanistan.