The newspaper said overtures are taking place just a month after President Barack Obama’s administration accused Pakistan’s spy agency of secretly supporting the Haqqani terrorist network, which has mounted attacks on Americans.
The revamped approach, which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has called “Fight, Talk, Build,” combines continued US air and ground strikes against the Haqqani network and the Taleban with an insistence that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency get them to the negotiating table, the report said.
Top US officials including Clinton visited Pakistan this month to press for action against Islamic extremists, particularly the Haqqani network, which is blamed for anti-US attacks in Afghanistan.
But some elements of the ISI see little advantage in forcing those negotiations, because they see the insurgents as perhaps their best bet for maintaining influence in Afghanistan, the paper noted.
The efforts at brokering a deal with militants come as early hopes in the White House about having the outlines of a deal ready in time for a multinational conference on Afghanistan on Dec. 5 in Bonn, Germany, have been all but abandoned, The Times noted.
Even inside the Obama administration, the new initiative has been met with deep skepticism, in part because the Pakistani government has developed its own strategy, the paper pointed out.
One US official summarized the Pakistani position as “Cease-fire, Talk, Wait for the Americans to Leave.”
Pakistan was the Taleban’s chief diplomatic backer when it was in power and is regularly accused by both Kabul and Washington of helping destabilize its northern neighbor.
A suicide bomber slammed a pickup truck packed with explosives into a checkpoint in a neighborhood housing UN and international aid group offices in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar on Monday, killing four people including the district police chief, Afghan officials said.
Immediately after the blast, three insurgents rushed into the neighborhood and seized control of at least one building, sparking a gunbattle with Afghan and NATO forces, Kandahar police chief Gen. Abdul Razzaq said. The firefight lasted more than two hours before the militants were shot dead.
The combined bombing and assault was the second major attack in three days to target foreigners or NATO troops in the country, and spotlighted the insurgents' ability to continue to carry out major attacks despite a 10-year NATO campaign against them. The US-led coalition is gradually handing over security responsibilities to its Afghan counterparts and plans to withdraw its combat forces by the end of 2014.
"Despite the insurgency's failures this past year, it remains capable and, enabled by safe havens in Pakistan, continues to contest (Afghan and NATO) progress in some parts of the country," German Brig Gen. Carsten Jacobson, a coalition spokesman in Afghanistan told reporters in Kabul.
