KARACHI, 4 December — The current situation in the Afghanistan capital is not conducive for Pakistan to open its embassy in Kabul, says a report here, and cited the presence of Russian and Indian diplomatic missions as the stumbling blocks.
The mood against Pakistan is so hostile in Kabul that Pakistan would not dare open its embassy there, The News daily newspaper says quoting a report in The New York Times. India, one of the first countries to establish its diplomatic presence in Kabul, fears that its diplomats may be mistaken for Pakistanis as they travel through Kabul.
The report says that except for the notable exception of Pakistan, a beeline of foreign diplomats is returning to their shuttered embassies in Kabul, or in some cases ruined ones, to play the new version of the old “great game.” This time around the struggle is for contacts, information and influence in Central Asia, writes The New York Times.
The disparate group, according to the newspaper, is united by one main factor: the desire to ensure that neither the Taleban nor anything like them ever again takes power in Afghanistan. So the key question is whether that quest for stability will take priority over support for individual Afghan factions, which would spark another round of civil war.
