Afghan President Hamid Karzai's latest visit to Pakistan is notable for the conciliatory tone he and his host President Pervez Musharraf adopted towards one another. Contrary to their show of annoyance towards each other at most previous public events, both leaders exhibited a lot of warmth.
Addressing a joint news conference on Wednesday, Karzai repeatedly called his Pakistani counterpart as "my brother" while the latter described their two countries as twins which "will gain together, will suffer together, will profit together, will lose together." This may look like a case of verbose rhetoric but it in fact is an accurate reflection of the Pak-Afghan relations for nearly three decades now.
Yet Kabul has been pointing an accusatory finger, every now and then, at Islamabad for allegedly being unhelpful in its fight against the Taliban. Afghan conflict's devastating spillover effect into Pakistan having removed whatever justification there was for the finger pointing, Karzai felt it necessary to say that militant attacks had declined on the Afghan side and increased in Pakistan.
Both he and President Musharraf also said that their intelligence agencies would cooperate more closely to deal with extremism and terrorism. Such co-operation is crucial in checking the militants' cross-border movement. It should also put a stop to the kind of wild guessing game that the Afghan government has been playing with regard to the whereabouts of al Qaeda leaders.
On more occasions than one, Karzai and others have said with a great amount of confidence that Osama bin Laden is hiding in NWFP's tribal belt and Mullah Omer in Quetta. President Musharraf and his colleagues, of course, responded with the obvious answer: 'give us actionable intelligence or shut up.'
Wheat flour shortages, transit trade as well as bilateral trade also figured prominently in the formal talks between the two sides this time. In fact, the level of Afghan dependence on our wheat flour as well as transit trade and Pakistan's vast economic and strategic interests in Afghanistan and the region beyond, explain the relevance of the 'twins' metaphor President Musharraf used to describe the bilateral relationship.
Karzai also invited Pakistani businesses to invest in different ventures in his country. Lest anyone should think it too risky to invest in an embattled country, he mentioned a $3 billion agreement that a Chinese company recently signed for copper mining in Afghanistan. Actually, no country is better poised to invest in Afghanistan than the next door neighbour Pakistan. There are a number of possibilities waiting to be explored and pursued.
One is the setting up of textile projects, which can prove to be particularly profitable given that cotton can be easily transported across the border to make value added products that may be marketable on preferential terms in Western countries on the basis of having originated in Afghanistan. Fruit processing and packaging facilities for export purposes are another area of lucrative prospects.
Leather goods are yet another idea worth pursuing. The trick is to investigate what the feasibility of various projects might be. Needless to say, such economic linkages will help this country secure the strategic relationship that it seeks to have with Afghanistan as part of its bigger plans of building energy and transport corridors between Central Asia and the rest of the world via the deep-sea port at Gwadar. It is hoped that our investors will take a deeper look at what is possible and try to achieve it too.
Comments
Comments are closed.