US working hard to have support for Afghan reconciliation

Washington: Aiming to get cooperation through dialogue, the US said that it is working hard to create an environment within Afghanistan and also in the region to have support for Afghan-Afghan reconciliation.

"We have been working hard to create an environment not only within Afghanistan, but also regionally have support for Afghan-Afghan reconciliation," State Department Spokesperson Victoria Nuland said yesterday in her daily news conference. Responding to questions, Nuland said the US supports an Afghan-led process of reconciliation. "We`re not going to get ahead of Kabul or anybody else in this process, but we are trying to encourage and support an environment where real talks and real progress can be made," she said. Saying that Pakistan needs to engage with Afghanistan directly, Nuland said the US supports dialogue between the two. "We have in our trilateral conversations -- US, Afghanistan, Pakistan -- worked on this quite hard, and we`ve been encouraging Pakistan and Afghanistan to work directly. So whenever they make progress together, that`s something that we support and it needs to be on the basis of dialogue, obviously," she said. On the question of release of Taliban prisoners by Pakistan, Nuland said this is an issue between Pakistan and Afghanistan for them to work on it together and for them to be able to have the kind of dialogue that allows them to work through these issues and to make sure that they have good management of individuals when they are released. She further stated that US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke to her Qatar counterpart regarding the Afghan- Afghan reconciliation but didn`t divulge the details of the talk. "I`m going to say that they did talk about Afghanistan. They obviously talked about the efforts that we are making, that the Government of Qatar is making to try to support Afghan-Afghan reconciliation, but I`m not going to get into any further details of that conversation," she said. PTI