Nato Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said on Wednesday he wanted direct talks between his military alliance in Afghanistan and the new government in Pakistan. With rows over troop numbers and deployments, and worries over the state of the porous Afghan-Pak border, Scheffer also dropped a broad hint he would soon head to Islamabad himself.
Speaking ahead of the formal opening of a Nato summit in Bucharest, Scheffer pleaded for more contact between the 47,000 strong Nato-led International Security Assistance Force and the Gillani government.
"Military-to-military contacts are good. We must complement a military dialogue with a political one. Nato/ISAF need a political dialogue with Pakistan because instability there breeds instability in Afghanistan," he told foreign policy experts ahead of the summit opening dinner.
Scheffer, who is holding the ring during this three-day conference in a row over the NATO allies’ varying troop deployments across Afghanistan, added: "I look forward to going to Pakistan when the government in settled in. We have a common fight against terrorism – my starting point – Pakistan is part of the solution, not part of the problem."
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, at the same event, criticised the previous government under President Pervez Musharraf. "We were told democracy (in Pakistan) would inflame the radicals," he said. "The problem was the previous government in Pakistan was cracking down on the democrats, not the extremists."
Scheffer insisted: "We are not failing, we are prevailing (in Afghanistan)," at the event, jointly organised by the Chatham House think-tank in London and the German Marshall Fund.
Meanwhile, a top former US State Department official has called for massive development assistance to curbing extremism in Pak-Afghan border regions through a new contract to address political, security and economic concerns of the two countries.
Karl Inderfurth, former assistant secretary of state for South Asia, also favored greater cooperative efforts with the new Pakistani government on integrating its tribal border areas into the South Asian nation`s mainstream system.
"Over the longer term, the region requires a new contract that addresses Afghanistan and Pakistan`s political, economic and security concerns and seeks to neutralise regional and great power rivalries," he advocated on the eve of NATO Summit in Romania where 26-member alliance will try to find ways to reinforce security efforts in insurgency-hit Afghanistan.
To accomplish this, Inderfurth said the United Nations should convene a high-level international conference attended by all Afghanistan`s neighbours and other concerned major powers. He suggested this task should be added to the agenda of the newly- appointed high-level UN envoy for Afghanistan, Norwegian diplomat Kai Eide.
"The goal would be a multilateral accord that recognises Afghanistan`s borders with Pakistan (the Durand Line of 1893 is still in dispute); pledges non-interference in Afghanistan`s internal affairs; affirms that, like the Congress of Vienna accord for Switzerland, Afghanistan should be internationally accepted as a permanently neutral state; and establishes a comprehensive international regime to remove obstacles to the flow of trade across Afghanistan, the key to establishing a vibrant commercial network that would benefit the entire region," the former official wrote in The Boston Globe.
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