Washington (PTI): Terming reconciliation with Taliban as "necessary," a senior State Department official has said that there is nothing "evil" about engaging militants in the political process if they abandon violence.

"I think it's necessary, but I wouldn't necessarily call it that evil," the US Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia Richard Boucher said.

"Some of the leadership in the Taliban, if they were willing to abandon violence and accept a new Constitution... if they were willing to come across, I suppose there has to be a political process to do that," he added.

Pointing out that Taliban leadership has not yet indicated that they are willing for a political engagement he said, "I have to say there's no sign that they really want to do that at this point. They're still on the there setting off bombs and kidnapping people."

"I think it's putting up a possibility of political solution because eventually have has to be one and there can be one," he said on National Public Radio.

Commenting on the change of strategy by the Taliban the senior State Department official said that, "Instead of trying to take over the government or take over territory, they're now just trying to make people feel unsafe. And they set off bombs and people do feel unsafe."

Stressing that one of the ways to stop the Taliban and other extremists from achieving their objective is to provide good governance to the people.

"The only way to stop that is to sort of put a blanket of governance on top of it. And so we need to do more so that we can provide safety, security, governance, schools, all that, throughout Afghanistan.

"We need to do better in terms of coordinating out of that so that people really get what they need from the government," Boucher remarked.

He did not agree to the notion that there was a flaw in the thinking of the Bush administration as Washington had not predicted the extent to which matters have evolved in Afghanistan.

"We've had to react and adjust as the situation involved. There have been a lot of disturbing factors, but, Afghanistan, you've got to remember, this was one of the poorest countries in the world from the '50's, '60's, and '70's. And then they went downhill for 20 years," Boucher said.

Adding on he said that it is not easy to achieve the targets as they are not simple but a very difficult and complex task.

"So a lot of what we're doing is construction. It's not easy. It's not simple. And it's not overnight. So we've — you might say we've built the government up so we have a government in Kabul that's capable of doing things around the country."

"We need to build the government out so that they're reaching all parts of the population. And that's where you're going to get true stability " the senior official said.