could only be restored in Afghanistan through a negotiated settlement. “This is also the firm consensus of the international community expressed repeatedly by the Security Council at the United Nations,” she said. The immediate challenge for both US and Pakistan, she said, was to find a common approach to Afghanistan even though both agreed that the stability and security of Afghanistan was a shared interest. Noting that both countries have benefited when they worked together, the Pakistani envoy pointed out that al-Qaeda’s degradation in the region was the result of Pakistan-US cooperation. “Indeed, no one desires peace in Afghanistan more than Pakistan,” Maleeha Lodhi told her audience. Apart from the people of Afghanistan, Pakistan and its people had suffered the most from four decades of the Afghan conflict, blighting Pakistan with the flow of extremists and terrorists, guns and drugs as well as the influx of millions of refugees and setting back the country’s economic development by decades. “But from Pakistan’s perspective the ‘new’ US strategy in Afghanistan relies overly on military force and more fighting to achieve an outcome, which has proved to be elusive using these means for the past decade and half,” the Pakistani envoy said. “Neither Kabul and the coalition, nor the Afghan Taliban, can impose a military solution on each other,” she said, adding, “We therefore feel the US, Pakistan and Afghanistan need to actively work towards a peace process.” Pakistan, she said, believes that the immediate and realistic goals in Afghanistan should be concerted action to eliminate the presence in Afghanistan of Daesh, remnants of al-Qaeda and their affiliates, including the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and promote negotiations between Kabul and the Afghan Taliban — in the Quadrilateral Coordination Mechanism — to evolve a peaceful settlement. Maleeha Lodhi said that Pakistan had successfully reversed the tide of terrorism by clearing its tribal and border areas of all militant groups.