ISTANBUL (Reuters) ? Afghan President Hamid Karzai again ruled out peace talks with the Taliban until he knew how to contact the insurgent group, and until then Afghanistan would talk only to Pakistan.
"We cannot keep talking to suicide bombers, therefore we have stopped talking about talking to the Taliban until we have an address for the Taliban ... until that day we have said we will be talking to our brothers in Pakistan to find a solution to the problem that we have," he said.
Karzai was speaking at a press conference in Istanbul alongside Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zardari following a summit hosted by Turkey to try to heal a rift over the September assassination of Afghan peace envoy Burhanuddin Rabbani.
Shortly after Rabbani's assassination in September, Karzai said there was no point talking to the insurgents and therefore it was best to talk directly with the Pakistanis.
While Pakistan and Afghanistan agreed to set up a "joint mechanism" to investigate Rabbani's assassination by a suicide bomber posing as a Taliban peace emissary, Karzai's comments suggested the two countries were far from resolving their differences.
"We have been hurt badly, our desire for peace has been either misunderstood or misused and we have learnt a lesson from the manner in which we pursued the peace process," Karzai said.
Afghanistan accuses Pakistan of supporting the Taliban and has said that Rabbani's killer was sent from the Pakistani city of Quetta.
(Reporting by Myra MacDonald and Jonathon Burch; Editing by Robert Woodward)
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