Pakistan foreign minister set for Kabul talks

Pakistan boycotted last year's Bonn conference on Afghanistan in protest of a deadly cross-border attack [Reuters]

Hina Rabbani Khar due to meet President Karzai on visit aimed at re-building ties between antagonistic neighbours.

Hina Rabbani Khar, the Pakistani foreign minister, is expected to meet Afghan President Hamid Karzai on a one-day visit to Kabul aimed at improving strained relations between the two neighbours. Wednesday’s meeting comes with bilateral and trilateral meetings (including the US) still frozen since the September assassination of Afghanistan’s chief peace negotiator, Burhanuddin Rabbani, which one Afghan minister blamed on Pakistani spies. In December, Pakistan boycotted a major conference in Germany on the future of Afghanistan to protest against a cross-border US air strike that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers on November 26. It also closed down the crucial supply routes that NATO forces uses. "This visit will mark a new co-operation phase between the two countries," Janan Mosazai, an Afghan foreign ministry spokesman, told reporters before what will be Khar's first visit to Afghanistan since taking office in July. Her trip comes as a leaked NATO report said the Pakistani security services were secretly helping the Taliban, an allegation made against the country’s powerful army and intelligence time and again. The report, obtained by the BBC and the UK-based Times newspaper, is derived from thousands of interrogations and alleges that Pakistan knows the locations of senior Taliban leaders. Khar meets her Afghan counterpart Zalmai Rasoul and Karzai amid tentative moves towards negotiations in Qatar involving the US and the Taliban, who were removed from power by a 2001 US-led invasion. Karzai has given a lukewarm welcome to the Taliban opening a political office in the Gulf state, but is wary of being sidelined and has insisted that his government should have a central role in any peace talks.

Source: Al Jazeera Agencies

Posted in: World News