Jul 12, 2016
By: Halimullah Kousary, Head of Research, CAPS

The Quadrilateral Coordination Group has failed to fulfill its purpose.

Recently Mullah Haibuttullah, the Taliban’s new chief, in his first Eid message warned of continued conflict until what he called the “occupation of Afghanistan” ends. Weeks earlier, his deputy Serajuddin Haqqani referred to the Afghan government as a puppet regime and said that holding peace talks with it was futile. The Taliban’s defiance over peace talks with the Afghan government comes as a NATO summit in Warsaw is expected to reaffirm the West’s commitment to Afghanistan. The evidence strongly suggests that there is scant cause for optimism over the future of the peace talks and that the Afghan government’s efforts in the form of the Quadrilateral Coordination Group (QCG) to get regional countries to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table has to date yielded no results.