Afghanistan Times
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Moscow does not want to join the US initiatives aimed at establishing stability and peace in Afghanistan. However, Russia is ready to set up a negotiation process independently.
On Monday a representative of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that Moscow does not want to participate in the Afghan peace process, where besides the US, China and Pakistan are also present at the negotiation table.
“We are not going to participate in these useless attempts and have already told the US about it. We do not see any practical sense in it. Russia does not want to be just a statistician, while Washington pursues its pre-elections targets” said the representative.
The diplomat also added that Russia is ready to promote its own peace plan, whose main goal is primarily to create a roadmap for restarting peace negotiations between the Taliban and the Afghan national government. However, until now Moscow did not present any ideas, because according to the diplomat “nobody has asked us yet to do it. Neither the Afghan government nor the Taliban.”
The peace talks aimed at laying the ground for an end to the war between the US-supported Afghan government forces and the Taliban, an Islamic fundamentalist group, who ran the country from 1996 until 2001. The first official talks between the government and the fundamentalist took place in July 2015 but were fruitless.
At present the Taliban represents a threat also to Pakistan, where the group emerged in the early 1990s in the northern part of the country following the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan in 1989.
One of the prominent case, which provoked international outrage and pushed the Pakistani government to take a tougher stance towards the Taliban occurred in 2012, when a schoolgirl, Malala Yousafzai, was shot in the head by the militants on her way home from the school. The girl survived the attack and in 2014 received the Nobel Peace Prize for her “struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education.” (New Europe)
