ISLAMABAD, 17 April 2007 — President Pervez Musharraf and his Afghan counterpart Hamid Karzai are set to meet for talks in Turkey in a bid to cool tensions between the two allies in the “war on terror,” officials said yesterday.

Ankara has offered to host the meeting between President Musharraf and President Karzai, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Tasnim Aslam told a weekly briefing.

“Arrangements are in hand for a possible trilateral meeting in response to an initiative by the Turkish government,” Tasnim said when asked to comment on newspaper reports that Musharraf and Karzai would hold talks.

The English-language daily, Dawn, said the two leaders would fly to Ankara on April 29 and hold talks in the presence of Turkish leaders.

Pakistan and Afghanistan have been at loggerheads for months over accusations that Islamabad is failing to stop Taleban militants based in its tribal areas from launching attacks across the border.

Tasnim made it clear that the Afghan leadership should better realize that terrorism inside Afghanistan is due to its own wrong policies.

She said the problems in Afghanistan could be attributed to the inability of the Afghan government to provide good governance, maintain rule of law and crack down on drug and warlords.

Musharraf hit out at Karzai on Friday, telling US television that he was “very angry” at Karzai’s criticisms and said that a “total lack of understanding of the environment and reality by President Karzai is to be blamed for the situation.” The Pakistani president also dismissed as “absolute nonsense” a claim by Karzai that fugitive Taleban leader Mullah Omar was hiding in Pakistan’s southwestern city of Quetta.

Musharraf last week said he was troubled by lingering mistrust of his commitment to the war on terror, saying that if Pakistani, Afghan and international forces “are all bluffing each other then it is better to end the cooperation.” “We expect the international community to have trust in us,” Tasnim said.

She added that the international community “should not try and deflect their own failures by criticizing Pakistan.”

Mutual trust remains an important factor among the members of the coalition fighting the war against terror, she said.

Responding to a question Tasnim said that Gulf countries, like all others, have the right to acquire nuclear technology.