Pakistan to support Karzai’s successor

KABUL has promised cooperation with President Hamid Karzai’s successor, renewing support for the June 14 presidential runoff election.

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s foreign policy advisor Tariq Fatemi also underlined the need for broad-based reconciliation in Afghanistan and trade links in South and Central Asia.

Speaking at a conference in Islamabad on Wednesday, he said Pakistan supported peaceful democratic transition and contributed to efforts for a free and fair elections in Afghanistan.

Having enhanced security along the border ahead of the crucial vote, Pakistan would work with whoever was elected by the Afghan people, the advisor was quoted as saying a newspaper.

According to the International Tribune, speakers hailed the recent presidential elections and the run-off next month as positive signs for the entire region.

Dr Adnan Sarwar Khan, chairman of the Peshawar University’s International Relations Department, said: “There is some show of positivity with the democratic elections in Afghanistan,”

Gulshan Sachdeva, chairperson of the School of International Studies at India’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, warned of a huge cost for India and Pakistan for not cooperating with Afghanistan after the 2014 drawdown.

Sachdeva believed materialisation of even a single regional project, for example the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline, could be a huge game-changer for the entire region.

Dr Iftekhar Ahmed Chawdhury, principal research fellow at the Institute of South Asian Studies at National University of Singapore, said South Asian countries looked for western aid rather than building trade links with each other.

Dr Markus Kaim, head of Research Division at the Berlin-based Institute for International and Society Affairs, said the best option for the South Asian countries was to have trade relations within the region.

PAN Monitor/mud

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