Pakistan and Afghanistan have decided to reboot relations by developing a ‘forward-looking vision’ based on cooperation instead of political competition. This is something that one can gauge from a statement issued by the Prime Minister Office in the wake of PM Imran Khan’s one-on-one meeting with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and his talks with members of the president’s delegation.
Pakistan and Afghanistan have agreed to bury the past misgivings and open a ‘new chapter of friendship and cooperation’. Although light on specifics, PM Imran reportedly told President Ghani that Pakistan remained committed to a peaceful, stable, democratic and prosperous Afghanistan and wished to have stronger political, trade, economic, and people-to-people relations with its western neighbour. The PM also assured the Afghan head of state that Pakistan would try and convince the Taliban to come to the table with Kabul, underlining that an Afghan-led and Afghan-owned peace process was the only viable option to end the decades-long conflict in Afghanistan.
The Afghan president rounded out the day by having meetings with the heads of three key opposition parties — Bilawal Bhutto of the PPP, Shehbaz Sharif of the PML-N, and Sirajul Haq of the JI — although no major developments were reported from those interactions. Speaking at a local think tank later, the Afghan president also said the agenda of connectivity was not a pipedream, but a pragmatic vision for the future, referencing the Central Asia-South Asia (CASA 1000) electricity transmission line and the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline. Work on these projects has been slow largely because of political, financial, and security issues. This would also tie into something the two leaders apparently agreed upon earlier to better utilise existing mechanisms such as the Afghanistan-Pakistan Transit Trade Coordination Authority (APTTCA) and the Joint Economic Commission (JEC) to address problems regarding transit and bilateral trade and to explore new possibilities of mutually-beneficial economic and commercial relations.
We hope this new chapter is less thrilling and more mundane than the dozens that the citizens of both countries, and indeed the world, have already been forced to cautiously flip through.
Published in The Express Tribune, June 29th, 2019.
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