ISLAMABAD: A four-member delegation headed by Afghanistan High Peace Council Secretary Mohammad Umar Daudzai arrived in Islamabad on a four-day visit on Tuesday to hold wide-ranging talks with senior Pakistani officials in the hope of securing a negotiated settlement to the 17-year-old war in neighbouring Afghanistan, a spokesman for the council said.

Daudzai, who holds additional charge as President Ashraf Ghani’s special advisor on reconciliation affairs, lands in Islamabad amid an intensification of moves towards bringing the Taliban to the table for talks. 

Kabul has long insisted that Pakistan use its influence over the Afghan Taliban -- who it claims live in safe havens in Pakistan's tribal areas -- to force them to the table for peace talks. Pakistan denies it harbours militant groups. 

Spokesman Sayed Ihsan Taheri said Afghan officials would meet Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi, Chief of Army Staff Gen. Qamar Javed Bajwa and other senior officials while in Islamabad.

“The Afghan delegation has a two-point agenda to discuss with Pakistani officials: regional peace and security and Pakistan’s support to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table,” Taheri told Arab News.

He said the delegation was also looking forward to meeting Prime Minister Imran Khan if he had no scheduled foreign tours, and reiterated that Islamabad had an "effective role" to play to push peace talks forward.

But optimism fostered by frantic rounds of diplomacy recently have been repeatedly dampened by the Taliban’s refusal to meet directly with representatives of the Afghan government, whom they see as an illegitimate, foreign-appointed regime.

On Tuesday, Reuters reported that the Afghan Taliban had called off peace talks with U.S. officials in Qatar this week due to an “agenda disagreement” over the involvement of Afghan officials, a possible ceasefire and prisoner exchange.

Two days of peace talks had been set to start on Wednesday and would have been the fourth round with U.S. special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad. Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the UAE took part in the last round of talks in December.

The Afghan government met with a Taliban delegation in 2015 in Pakistan but that process fell apart when news leaked that the Taliban leader Mullah Omar, on whose behalf the delegation said they had come, had been dead for three years.