Pakistan’s follow-up action on terror tag for Taliban leader is an invite for talks

Less than a week after taking steps to enforce UN Security Council sanctions against hundreds of terrorists, Pakistan on Monday invited a Taliban delegation led by one of the UN-designated leaders for talks on Afghanistan’s troubled peace process.
Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a co-founder of the Taliban and deputy political chief of the group, was among the scores of Taliban and Haqqani Network operatives named in a statutory regulatory order issued by Pakistan’s Foreign Office on August 18 to enforce the UN sanctions, which include a freeze on assets, a travel ban and ensuring they cannot access weapons.
Baradar and the delegation of senior Taliban leaders arrived in Islamabad from Doha in Qatar on Monday, and are expected to hold talks with Pakistan’s civilian and military leadership.
Pakistan’s recent move to enforce the UN sanctions, which also apply to Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) founder Hafiz Saeed, Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar and hundreds of terrorists, was widely perceived as having been taken with an eye on an upcoming assessment of the country’s counter-terror financing regime by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF). The assessment is expected in October.