Clarification: The News would like to correct remarks attributed to Dr Maleeha Lodhi in her talk at the Karachi Literature Festival on Saturday, February 8.
What Pakistan’s former envoy to the US and UK had said was that the absence of a peace process aimed at political accommodation among Afghans puts all the transitions this year in Afghanistan in jeopardy. Afghanistan, she said, had three crucial transitions to negotiate in 2014, political, economic and security. The most important transition was the political one and this could only be successful if peace talks were launched among Afghans. It is in this context that she had mentioned the Doha initiative in which the US and Pakistan had cooperated to take a nascent peace process forward by persuading the Afghan Taliban to engage in a dialogue. But the Americans abandoned this process for fear of annoying Hamid Karzai who opposed the Doha initiative. The US was hoping was that this might persuade Karzai to sign the BIlateral Security Agreement., but he refused to do so.
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