Kabul should address Pakistan’s concerns on India

[Tiki Tam Tam]

the article is about food security in pakistan and in india theres lack of food. theres a big difference. in baluchistan its the vast size which causes a problem not the lack of food, the population of baluchistan is about 6 million.

Lack of food in India?

Seen the reserves? Check it out.

It is just that the prices are going up.

Now check prices in Pakistan of similar commodities.

 

[Tiki Tam Tam]

Ordinary Afghans don't care about the Durand Line. They are allowed to cross it all the time. It makes no difference to them.

That is your opinion and you are entitled to it.

It makes a lot of difference to the ordinary and extraordinary Pashtuns.

Now, if they cross over with impunity, it means they don't take it to be different from Pashtun areas of Afghanistan and that the Pakistan govt has no control in ensuring the integrity of the border and its sovereignty wherein Pashtuns care two hoots for the same!

 

[Majnun]

Indian Army was nowhere.

It still isn't.

 

[Majnun]

That is your opinion and you are entitled to it.

It makes a lot of difference to the ordinary and extraordinary Pashtuns.

Now, if they cross over with impunity, it means they don't take it to be different from Pashtun areas of Afghanistan and that the Pakistan govt has no control in ensuring the integrity of the border and its sovereignty wherein Pashtuns care two hoots for the same!

Extraordinary Pashtuns???
What are you talking about?

If they don't take it to be different, they don't care about it and couldn't care less which country it belongs to.

 

[muse]

Subtle but more of the same. US and NATO are the occupying powers but the blame is not theirs - all the authority and none of the responsibility - the best of all possible worlds - but then what else could it be when the US and NATO, the new overlords are involved:


Resolving old rivalries
By Karl F. Inderfurth and Wendy Chamberlin

Thursday, July 17, 2008
The deadly suicide attack last week on the Indian Embassy in Kabul has put Afghanistan in a familiar but unwanted position - a "back to the future" scenario, caught up again in the intrigues and suspicions of its neighbor, Pakistan, and Pakistan's neighbor, India. But this time around, the stakes are too high to replay old rivalries.

President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan said that Pakistan's intelligence service, known as the ISI, was behind the Indian Embassy bombing. His government announced it would boycott a series of meetings with Pakistan until "bilateral trust" was restored.

Indian officials said the attack was intended to send a stark message to India: Get out of Afghanistan. India's national security adviser, M.K. Narayanan, declared that the ISI must be "destroyed" and that if things continued in this manner, there would be no choice but to "retaliate in kind."

Pakistan's prime minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani, declared all accusations "baseless" and "malicious."

It was not supposed to be this way.

The February election in Pakistan was a positive return to civilian-led democracy in that country. The new leadership in Islamabad said it wanted to improve long-troubled relations with Kabul. But five months later the civilian coalition in Pakistan is weak and in crisis.

Internal struggles between Pakistan's two major parties - the PPP, led by the late Benazir Bhutto's husband, Asif Ali Zardari, and the PML-N, led by former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif - have left a foreign policy vacuum that radical elements, almost certainly with ISI connections, have exploited to advance their own agenda. That agenda is a flashback to the period before 9/11, when the ISI believed it needed a friend (Taliban) in Kabul to offset Indian influence in Afghanistan.

Combined with the many other challenges facing Afghanistan today, the recent revival of the Pakistan-Indian rivalry makes the odds of Afghanistan becoming a stable country that much more remote. A multi-pronged diplomatic initiative by the parties involved, with strong international support, is urgently needed to turn this situation around.

Reducing antagonisms between Afghanistan and Pakistan must be the top priority. Afghanistan has legitimate concerns, especially about the resurgent Taliban's use of Pakistani territory as a safe haven. Kabul blames Islamabad for this. Islamabad's full and continuous cooperation to stop cross-border attacks in Afghanistan, as well as ISI interference in Afghanistan's affairs, is an essential condition for stabilizing relations.

For its part, Pakistan is aggrieved at Karzai's public finger-pointing at Pakistan after every spectacular extremist attack, like the Taliban raid that liberated 400 prisoners in Afghanistan. The truth is that both Kabul and Islamabad share the same enemies. Taliban, Al Qaeda, ISI-supported terrorist groups that operated in Kashmir, and even the old militant groups that the United States once supported to fight against the Soviets now stage attacks on Pakistani, Afghan, U.S. and NATO forces. A mutual effort to counter the common threat would be a more productive approach.

Pakistan and India also should build on their positive diplomatic developments over the past several years to tackle the very sensitive issue of Afghanistan. Approaching talks in New Delhi between the foreign ministers of the two countries provide an excellent opportunity to do this. But it won't be easy.

India will claim it has legitimate interests in Afghanistan and that it is a major donor in the international effort to rebuild that country. Pakistan will charge that India is running operations out of its many consulates in Afghanistan to stir trouble across the border, especially to fan the flames of the anti-Islamabad insurgency in Baluchistan. Pakistan sees itself as potentially caught in a vice between its western and eastern neighbors.

But these long-standing concerns are now being trumped by a new reality, the need for India and Pakistan to look beyond their traditional rivalries and agree on a joint strategy to confront the extremists operating along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

"Whatever problems we had with Pakistan," says C. Raja Mohan, a leading Indian security analyst, "Pakistan had been a buffer between India and the badlands. Now the buffer is falling apart. Afghanistan needs to be stabilized. Pakistan needs to be stabilized. This requires more drastic action."

Direct talks also present the opportunity for India and Pakistan to address the one issue that has long bedeviled their relations - the dispute over Kashmir. After a long history of playing a "dirty game" with terrorist groups against India, the tables have turned. The terrorist groups present a much more serious threat to Pakistan's internal stability than they offer as instruments of asymmetrical warfare against India. Today's common security interests of India and Pakistan should drive the two countries toward finding a settlement over Kashmir.

Pakistan's foreign minister, Makhdoom Shah Mahmood Qureshi, recently said in Washington: "The time is now for taking bold steps to take Pakistan and India out of a cycle of hostility, acrimony, and mutual suspicion." That advice also applies to efforts to stabilize Afghanistan. All three countries need to engage in active, high-level diplomacy aimed at stemming the spread of extremism in their common neighborhood. Their security fates are intertwined.

Karl F. Inderfurth served as U.S. assistant secretary of state for South Asia from 1997-2001 and is a professor of international affairs at George Washington University. Wendy Chamberlin served as U.S. ambassador to Pakistan from 2001-2002 and is president of the Washington-based Middle East Institute.

 

[Majnun]

There will be no "bilateral trust" under Karzai.

 

[GHATAK]

salim i dont get your point, we are discussing the situation where afghanistan is overplaying her hand with india against pakistan, thats the bottom line, my perception of india or your perception of pakistan is not the issue.
during the 90s we did not receive any military aid as you like calling it. how silly, when you go to the shop to buy your dosa is it aid when you pay your 3 rupees for it.
ps it is a documented fact that half of all children in india are malnourished and 700million of you have no access to running water or toilets. maybe sarkozy and brown were looking into it. maybe

1USD = 42.8INR
1USD = 71.8PKR

If you want to talk more, be prepared to absorb the hurting facts.

So please stop the crap. Simple isn't it.