However, he said that Pak-Afghan negotiations have faced delays due to the non-provision of written guarantees from the Afghan side.
Responding to points raised by Mashal Azam in Senate, he said the government fully supported the ongoing PakistanAfghanistan peace talks. “This government has always believed that all outstanding issues with Afghanistan must be resolved through negotiations,” he noted.
However, he said that despite verbal acknowledgements by the Taliban regime regarding the presence of TTP safe havens, the refusal to provide written assurances had resulted in the current stalemate in talks.
Chaudhry said that Pakistan would continue pursuing diplomatic channels to achieve lasting peace and stability in the region.
The Taliban regime on Saturday its ceasefire with Pakistan would remain even though their latest talks failed. The two sides met on Thursday in Turkey to finalise a truce agreed on October 19 in Qatar, following deadly clashes between the South Asian neighbours.
Both have remained tight-lipped on the content of the discussions, which are known only to have addressed long-standing security issues.
At a news conference later on, Mujahid stressed that the ceasefire “will hold”. “There is no issue with the ceasefire previously agreed upon with Pakistan, it will hold,” he said. Neither Islamabad nor mediators immediately commented on the announcement that the talks had failed.
Information Minister Attaullah Tarar had previously hinted that negotiations in Turkey were falling through, saying that the onus lay on Afghanistan to fulfil pledges to clamp down on terrorism, “which so far they have failed”. “Pakistan shall continue to exercise all options necessary to safeguard the security of its people and its sovereignty,” he wrote.
Referring to a 2018 precedent when Nawaz Sharif, had signed Senate election tickets as President of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), he said that the Supreme Court of Pakistan later ruled that a convicted individual could not issue party tickets, causing the cancellation of those nominations and the election of candidates as independent members.
He said it was therefore misleading and undemocratic to claim that constitutional amendments could only be undertaken with the consent of a convicted person. “The authority to amend the Constitution rests solely with parliament – the Senate and the National Assembly – through a two-thirds majority,” he said.