ISLAMABAD, 29 April 2007 — Pakistan and Afghanistan are to hold crucial summit talks in Turkey to ease friction and develop a joint strategy on fighting the Taleban insurgency, officials confirmed yesterday.
Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and his Afghan counterpart Hamid Karzai were due in the Turkish capital today, the Pakistani Embassy in Ankara said.
The two leaders would attend a dinner meeting hosted by Turkish President Ahmet Necdet Sezer, followed by a formal round of bilateral talks tomorrow.
Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, whose country has troops with NATO in Afghanistan, would also host a working lunch for them.
“The summit meeting is crucial in thrashing out differences and evolving a joint strategy to fighting terrorism,” Pakistani embassy spokesman Majeed Niazi told AFP.
Mutual recriminations have clouded relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan, both key US allies in the fight against terrorism.
Kabul accuses Islamabad of not doing enough to stop militants crossing from its tribal areas into Afghanistan to abet the Taleban insurgency, which claimed 4,000 lives last year.
Islamabad says it has taken effective measures and accuses Afghanistan of shifting the blame on to Pakistan for its own failures in tackling the Taleban, a booming drug trade and warlords impeding the government’s writ in the country.
Musharraf has repeatedly stressed that Pakistan, once the main backer of the Taleban regime, has deployed 90,000 troops in the tribal areas and set up more than 1,000 military check-posts along the 2,500-km frontier.
Ahead of the Ankara meeting, Musharraf in an interview published Thursday with a Spanish newspaper bitterly criticized Karzai.
“Those who do nothing against terrorism, like Karzai, are also the ones who criticize those who are fighting, like us,” Musharraf, who is on a tour of three European countries, told El Pais daily.
“Those who say that the ISI (Pakistani military intelligence) helps the Taleban because we want a weak Afghanistan are liars.” Karazi the same day told a media briefing in Kabul that he was optimistic about the outcome of the Ankara summit.
“We attend this meeting to find a solution for a problem which is gripping Afghanistan, Pakistan and the region with good intentions. We hope to come with good achievements,” Karzai said.
“We hope to have achievements for peace in the region, peace in Afghanistan and Pakistan, from the tripartite meeting.”
Pakistan is also experiencing fallout from the Taleban spillover as extremists in its tribal territory are becoming increasingly powerful, forcing the government to enter into peace deals with them.
The peace deals which were viewed with suspicion in Kabul and Washington led to a tribal uprising against foreign militants in South Waziristan. During the last two months tribal fighters have killed 300 foreign Al-Qaeda militants.
Karzai and Musharraf last met for talks in Washington in September, when US President George W. Bush brought them together to try to ease tensions, but failed to calm down the two sides.
There are nearly 50,000 US and NATO troops in Afghanistan to fight the Taleban, whose five-year regime was toppled in a US-led military blitz in late 2001 for harboring Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden.
