Rapprochement: It’s official now, Sushma will visit Pakistan

To have bilateral engagements on sidelines of Heart of Asia conference

ISLAMABAD:

First their prime minister had an ‘unscheduled and informal’ chit-chat in Paris. Then their top security adviser sprang a ‘surprise’ in Bangkok. And now top foreign ministry officials of Pakistan and India are set to formally meet in Islamabad, in an effort to normalise the two countries’ relations marked by years of strain and acrimony.

A day after Pakistan’s National Security Adviser Lt Gen (retd) Nasser Khan Janjua met his Indian counterpart Ajit Doval in Bangkok, New Delhi announced that India’s External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj will be travelling to Islamabad for a ministerial meeting of the Heart of Asia-Istanbul Process.

Leading a nine-member delegation including the foreign secretary, the top Indian diplomat is arriving in Islamabad today (Tuesday) and is understood to have bilateral engagements on the sidelines of the conference. She will hold talks with Pakistan’s de facto foreign minister Sartaj Aziz, and call on Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.

Aziz told reporters on Monday that the Bangkok talks had been able to break the deadlock in talks between the two countries. “This is a good beginning. We hope to carry forward the process,” added Aziz, who was originally scheduled to lead an NSA-level meeting in August in New Delhi which was called off at the last minute after differences on the agenda emerged.

Aziz said the fate of the composite dialogue between Pakistan and India will be clear only once he had talks with the Indian foreign minister on the margins of the Heart of Asia conference.

This is the first visit by any Indian foreign minister to Pakistan in three years. In 2012 then Indian external affairs minister, SM Krishna, had travelled to Islamabad where the two neighbours signed a visa liberalisation accord.



A senior Foreign Office official, who was briefed on the Janjua-Doval talks, told The Express Tribune that there was a desire from both sides to positively engage with each other. Speaking off-the-record, the official disclosed that the meeting in Thailand’s capital was ‘successful’ hoping that its outcome would soon be visible.

He added that the decision to keep the meeting secret until it was over was taken in an effort to avoid media hype which, according to him, complicated matters between the two countries in the past.

The apparent chance meeting between Premier Nawaz and his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi in Paris on the sidelines of the UN Climate Change Conference on November 30 helped end the stalemate.

But sources claimed that the two countries were engaged quietly much before the Paris rendezvous. They revealed that Pakistan’s High Commissioner in New Delhi Abdul Basit had a ‘secret’ meeting with Doval to discuss the agenda of Bangkok talks days before the two prime minister had the brief chat in Paris.

But the entire process was kept so secret that officials involved in the ‘backchannel’ efforts were directed not to divulge any details to the media. “Only a handful of people were from the two sides in the loop,” a source told The Express Tribune.

Afghan President confirms Pakistan visit

Monday not only brought good news from Pakistan’s eastern border but also from the western front, as Afghan President Ashraf Ghani confirmed that he would be travelling to Islamabad for the Heart of Asia conference.

President Ghani and Premier Nawaz will co-inaugurate the conference to be attended by 27 countries.

The two-day Heart of Asia conference in Islamabad, which begins today is seen as a chance to lay the basis for resumption of an Afghan peace process broken off in July, although Afghan officials caution that obstacles remain. Previous conferences of the process had been held in Turkey, Kazakhstan and China.

“This is not Pakistan’s conference, this is Afghanistan’s conference,” Ghani, who had not previously confirmed his attendance, told reporters at a news conference in Kabul, according to Reuters.

Referring to recent reports that Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansoor had died in a gunfight with other Taliban commanders, a development likely to further complicate any fresh peace talks, Ghani said there was no evidence to prove he had been killed.

Afghanistan has long harbored deep suspicion of Pakistan, accusing it of sponsoring the Taliban insurgency in what Ghani has referred to as a 14-year long ‘undeclared war’ between the two countries.

Under pressure from the United States, Ghani has stepped up efforts to improve relations, although they received a setback when peace talks with the Taliban, facilitated by Pakistan, broke down in July.

“Peace must be made between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The relations of two states are not relations between two youngsters - to be friends for an hour and then don’t talk to each the next hour,” Ghani said.


Published in The Express Tribune, December 8^th, 2015.