For instance, Pakistan army is keen to train Afghan army and police. “I cannot afford to have Afghan soldiers on my western borders trained by the Indians and with an Indian mindset,” Kayani says. He was in Kabul ahead of Karzai’s visit to Islamabad to pursue his proposal. He also moved the NATO for help. But in the absence of any progress on his request, the Afghan President appeared unwilling to take up Kayani offer at their meeting which, significantly enough took place at the GHQ.
President Karzai wants to be assured that the Quetta Shura had become dysfunctional after the arrests of some top Afghan Taliban leaders in Pakistan. He wants the arrested Afghans to be sent back home to stand trial under the Afghan law.
There were no assurances forthcoming from his hosts even after he called Pakistan a ‘conjoined twin’. He also publicly distanced himself from India terming it as a friend and saying that the India-Afghan friendship, as the News International noted editorially, is limited to the economic sphere.
“India is a close friend of Afghanistan but Pakistan is a brother of Afghanistan. Pakistan is a twin brother. We are conjoined twins, there’s no separation,” he said.
Yet, a breakthrough as such eluded barring an agreement to revive the Afghan-Pakistan jirga process, which is not a big deal. In fact, such a jirga exercise in the past met with no success.
Pakistan is upto its old games in Afghanistan. It has begun to tap its proxies with no concern what so ever for the position of Karzai even after he had gone public with his contacts with Mullah Omar, the Afghan Taliban head.
“We do have contacts, as high as you wish to go. Mulla Omar? Yes, (I have had contacts), as an Afghan to an Afghan. Yes, he talked to me within the Afghan constitution,” he told the Pak media during an interaction on Thursday.
The Afghan President is upset with some of the arrests Pakistan has made this past week. And he conveyed his unhappiness to his interlocutors and asked them not to undermine Kabul’s initiatives.
These arrests have become a source of “a very serious underlying tension” between the two countries, according to respected Pak journalist, Ahmed Rashid, who is also an expert on Taliban.
Islamabad has rejected Karzai request for extradition of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the No. 2 in the Taliban figure, even a month after he was detained in Karachi by the ISI. As Rashid notes, ISI has picked up some of the more pragmatic Taliban leaders. These are the very people who are holding talks with Kabul. The possibility of hardliners replacing the arrested in the Taliban hierarchy is a possibility that cannot be ruled out.
JOINT DECLARATION
Joint declaration signed by Foreign Minister Shah Mehmud Qureshi of Pakistan and his Afghan counterpart Zalmai Rassoul at the end of state visit of Afghan President Hamid Karzai to Pakistan, said both sides agreed to develop a roadmap for strengthening road, rail and air connectivity and upgrading existing facilities.
It said the two countries attached priority to undertaking completion of Peshawar-Jalalabad Expressway and completing feasibility study of Peshawar-Jalalabad rail link. It was agreed to undertake joint studies on promotion and facilitation of Multi-Modal Transport, and enhance communication links for the expansion of aviation links and extend bus services to additional destinations on mutually agreed routes.
Another decision was that the two sides will establish a Silk Route CEOs Forum, as well as establish Pakistan-Afghanistan Reconstruction Consortium. The two sides decided to evolve joint strategies for early implementation of trans-Afghan energy projects, with particular focus on CASA-1000 and Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan Gas Pipeline.
