ISLAMABAD, 17 February 2006 — Pakistan and Afghanistan will continue their joint efforts to weed out terrorism from the region to bring peace and stability to the troubled region.

It was decided during the meeting of Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz here yesterday.

Official statements said Pakistan and Afghanistan reviewed the border situation. It was decided to further boost cross-border security arrangements.

Aziz assured Karzai that Pakistan was making all efforts to flush out extremists and terrorists from the society.

Karzai appealed to Pakistan’s powerful military yesterday to help make his country a strong, stable partner, or risk Pakistan’s own progress being hobbled by an unstable neighbor.

A wave of 15 suicide bombings in Afghanistan since November, most claimed by the Taleban, has outraged Afghans and led to fresh accusations Pakistan is not doing enough to stop militants from launching attacks from the safety of its soil.

Karzai called on Pakistan to intensify its efforts to root out terrorism in talks with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf soon after he arrived in Islamabad on Wednesday.

Yesterday, he made a similar appeal to the military.

“Preventing progress in Afghanistan is, ladies and gentlemen, exactly preventing progress in Pakistan for very obvious reasons,” Karzai told Pakistan Army officers at the National Defense College in Islamabad.

“The stronger, the better, the more prosperous Afghanistan, the stronger, the more prosperous is Pakistan,” he said.

Although both countries are allies in the US-led war on terrorism, relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan have been testy for much of the time since Pakistan’s independence. Karzai said an unstable Afghanistan would feed terrorism, which both countries were trying to battle.

“A poor friend is a liability, a lame friend is a liability,” he said. “If we have to walk together, do you want to have a companion that is sick, that is lame, that can’t walk with you. Or do you want to have a companion that is healthy, that can walk with you?”

Pakistan officially dropped support for the Taleban after the Sept. 11 attacks and has since arrested hundreds of Al-Qaeda members, including top lieutenants of Osama Bin Laden.

Pakistan sent 70,000 troops into tribal lands on the border to flush out Al-Qaeda-linked foreign militants who took refuge there after the defeat of the Taleban in Afghanistan in late 2001.

But the Taleban, most of them ethnic Pashtun, often with tribal links on both sides of the porous border, are still being allowed to operate from Pakistan, Afghan officials say.

Karzai and his delegation handed over to Pakistan a list of wanted Taleban officials including their fugitive leader, Mulla Mohammad Omar, who some Afghan officials believe lives in Pakistan, an Afghan official said.

“We were given cooperation promises and we will see in the future as to what level they will be implemented,” an Afghan Defense Ministry official said.

Pakistan rejects accusations that Taleban commanders are plotting and launching attacks into Afghanistan from Pakistani territory. Musharraf said on Wednesday terrorism was a common enemy and the two countries had to fight it together.

Asked if he was in favor of building a border fence, as Pakistan proposed last year to stop infiltration, Karzai said a fence was not the way to end terrorism.