Qureshi’s Afghanistan visit rekindles hopes of a detente
It is uncommon for a high-ranking official of any new government in Pakistan to make their first foreign visit to Afghanistan instead of friendly nations such as Saudi Arabia or China. But new Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi, in a departure from the past, decided to make a one-day trip to the Afghan capital, Kabul, on Sept. 15 in a bid to show the importance Pakistan attaches to improving its often uneasy relations with neighboring Afghanistan.
The visit took place barely a month after the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party, led by charismatic cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan, took power after winning the July 25 general election. Khan has also been invited to visit Afghanistan by President Ashraf Ghani, but the outcome of his foreign minister’s trip to Kabul will be analyzed before the prime minister decides whether to visit Afghanistan to build on the momentum for improving bilateral relations.
Khan may also wait for Ghani and his Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah to visit Pakistan, as invitations have been extended. Though Qureshi was quoted as saying rather hopefully that Ghani and Abdullah would visit Pakistan in October, doubts remain as to whether they will come so soon without getting assurances that their visits would achieve anything substantive. The Afghan president has twice visited Pakistan since winning the disputed presidential election of 2014, but his third visit is long-awaited despite numerous invites. Abdullah, on the other hand, hasn’t visited Pakistan, but this is understandable owing to the lack of warmth in the ties between Islamabad and his party, Jamiat-e Islami, and in particular its former leader, the late Afghan mujahideen commander Ahmad Shah Massoud.
Qureshi, who also served as foreign minister from 2008 to 2011 during the rule of the late Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), described as “very advantageous” his visit to Afghanistan after holding talks with his Afghan counterpart Salahuddin Rabbani and meeting Ghani and Abdullah. However, his remark that the “clouds of fear” had faded away was a bit unclear because he didn’t elaborate as to who was the source of fear and how it had faded way.
One clear outcome of the visit was the agreement to expedite the holding of meetings of bilateral forums such as the Joint Economic Commission, the Afghanistan-Pakistan Transit Trade Coordination Authority, the steering committee of the joint ulema conference, and working groups of the Afghanistan-Pakistan Action Plan for Peace and Solidarity (APAPPS). These meetings have been delayed primarily due to the tensions in bilateral relations triggered by acts of violence in the two countries and the blame games that invariably followed. If Qureshi is to be believed, most of these meetings will take place in October and will hopefully help “build mutually beneficial relationships and enhance cooperation.”
The key point highlighted during Qureshi’s visit was to make greater use of the APAPPS framework by setting up five working groups for focused discussions on issues ranging from security to border management and allowing Pakistan-based Afghan refugees to trade.
Rahimullah Yusufzai
The need for using the Joint Economic Commission was emphasized to expand trade and commerce between the two countries. As a goodwill gesture, Pakistan had earlier decided to waive regulatory duty on imports from Afghanistan. This led to a 118 percent increase in Afghan exports to Pakistan in 2018. Bilateral trade is overwhelmingly in Pakistan’s favor because war-ravaged Afghanistan, with its depressed economy, doesn’t have much to export.
Being landlocked, Afghanistan has also been overly dependent on Pakistan for carrying out its transit trade. However, poor relations have delayed renewing the five-year Afghanistan-Pakistan Transit Trade Agreement that expired in 2015. Kabul has been postponing meetings for discussing the renewal of the agreement because it wants Pakistan to allow Indian goods to use the overland Pakistani route to reach Afghanistan. Islamabad has allowed Afghan products to use Pakistan’s land route to reach Wagah, its border town with India, but has linked permission for allowing Indian goods to pass in the opposite direction to improved India-Pakistan relations, which remain hostile due to the suspension of bilateral talks following the November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai.
The Qureshi-Rabbani agreement to finally hold the joint conference of Afghan and Pakistani ulema is seen as a step forward because the religious scholars are expected to issue a decree declaring suicide bombings as un-Islamic and calling for an end to the use of Afghanistan and Pakistan’s territory for carrying out acts of violence in the two neighboring countries.
Another decision was to hold the second round of trilateral talks involving Afghanistan, Pakistan and China. During the last such meeting, hosted by China in November 2017, Beijing formally launched efforts to mediate between Islamabad and Kabul.
The key point highlighted during Qureshi’s visit was to make greater use of the APAPPS framework agreed upon in early summer by setting up five working groups for focused discussions on issues ranging from security and anti-terrorism cooperation to border management and allowing Pakistan-based Afghan refugees to trade.
We will have to keep our fingers crossed to see if any of the decisions made are implemented, as past agreements were seldom put into practice. Qureshi’s visit has rekindled hopes, but it remains to be seen if Pakistan can play any meaningful role in peacefully ending the four decades of Afghan conflict in line with Kabul’s expectations.
– Rahimullah Yusufzai is senior political and security analyst of Pakistan. He was the first to interview Taliban founder Mullah Mohammad Omar and twice interviewed Osama Bin Laden in 1998.
Twitter: @rahimyusufzai1
