ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi said yesterday that President Asif Zardari has rescheduled his first official trip to Afghanistan, cancelled last week due to bad weather, for early January.
Zardari had been due to fly to Kabul on Friday for talks with Afghan President Hamid Karzai on how to tackle the resurgent Taliban, but his plane was unable to leave Islamabad.
“The president will visit Afghanistan in the first week of January, Inshallah (God willing),” Qureshi told reporters at the airport in Multan. “I hope that there will be a pleasant change in the relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan, which have been strained for some time.”
Islamabad and Kabul, allies in the US-led “war on terror,” are struggling to rein in Taliban and Al-Qaeda militants who have been holed up in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas since the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001.
Karzai has accused Islamabad in the past of not doing enough to prevent cross-border operations by Taliban insurgents against Afghan and international troops.
