India, Pakistan gear up for meetings on Afghanistan

Tribune News Service
New Delhi, December 18

India and Pakistan are gearing up for their respective meetings of Foreign Ministers on Sunday in which Afghanistan will be prominently discussed but with a different focus.

All five Central Asian Foreign Ministers arrived in Delhi by Saturday evening, giving a miss to the Organisation of Islamic Countries (OIC) meet in Islamabad.

The OIC meet promises to be a much bigger gathering, restricted not just to its members and observers but also has Special Envoys to Afghanistan from all the five UNSC permanent members—the US, the UK, France, China and Russia—as also from Germany and the EU.

The main theme for the OIC meeting is humanitarian assistance. The Taliban Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi is also in Islamabad to sharpen the pitch on the issue as well as seek the freeing of Afghan forex reserves in the US.

The New Delhi meeting of the Central Asian Foreign Ministers with External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar as the host will cover a wider palette. It will also firm up the invitation to the leaders of the five countries as Guests of Honour for next year’s Republic Day parade.

On Afghanistan, they are likely to pick up the threads of the November 10 meeting of NSAs hosted by Ajit Doval which was attended by his counterparts from all five Central Asian countries, Iran and Russia. The focus would be more on the overspill of terrorism and drug trafficking from Afghanistan.

A US report on terrorism released on Friday corroborated India’s apprehensions of terrorism from Af-Pak area. It noted that many terrorist groups with regional or transnational ambitions continue to operate freely from Afghanistan and Pakistan. Countries like Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, whose diaspora extends into Afghanistan, are unhappy with the rough treatment given to Afghan leaders sharing their ethnicity. Their interest in having a representative government intersects with those of India.

They will also discuss connectivity which is of vital interest to them as most of these countries are double-landlocked. Central Asia also has reserves of oil, gas, uranium and other rare metals.

All the Foreign Ministers Mukhtar Tileuberdi (Kazakhstan), Sirojiddin Muhriddin (Tajikistan), Ruslan Kazakbaev (Kyrgyzstan), Abdulaziz Kamilov (Uzbekistan) and Rashid Meredov (Turkmenistan) had arrived here.