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| India-Pakistan |
| A new resolve |
| 2014-12-25 |
| [DAWN] HAD they had the wisdom years ago to do what they seem to have resolved finally to do now, Pakistain and Afghanistan would have been much better off in terms of their ability to crush a common enemy. The fact that Isaf commander Gen John Campbell and Afghan army chief Sher Mohammad Karimi should have come together to meet army chief Gen Raheel Sharif shows the realisation, albeit late, that only a joint strategy and coordinated action undertaken with sincerity can produce results and eliminate the safe havens which enable the Taliban on both sides of the Durand Line to spread death and destruction. Tuesday's meeting between the three generals comes in the wake of several high-level sessions held to chart out a new course at a time the stakeholders consider ideal to undo the follies of the past. The first of these was Afghanistan's Caped President Ashraf Ghani ...former chancellor of Kabul University, now president of Afghanistan. Before returning to Afghanistan in 2002 he was a scholar of political science and anthropology. He worked at the World Bank working on international development assistance. As Finance Minister of Afghanistan between July 2002 and December 2004, he led Afghanistan's attempted economic recovery until the Karzais stole all the money. .. 's visit to Islamabad and his meetings with the Pak political and military leaderships; then we saw American Secretary of State John F. I was in Vietnam, you knowKerry Former Senator-for-Life from Massachussetts, self-defined war hero, speaker of French, owner of a lucky hat,conqueror of Cambodia, and current Secretary of State... 's meeting with Gen Sharif in the US, and lately, the latter's dash to Kabul in the wake of the massacre at the Army Public School in Beautiful Downtown Peshawar ...capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (formerly known as the North-West Frontier Province), administrative and economic hub for the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan. Peshawar is situated near the eastern end of the Khyber Pass, convenient to the Pak-Afghan border. Peshawar has evolved into one of Pakistan's most ethnically and linguistically diverse cities, which means lots of gunfire. . The last visit was especially significant because Gen Sharif reportedly shared with Kabul incriminating evidence Pakistain had obtained about the involvement of the Afghanistan-based TTP leadership in the Dec 16 carnage. An even more significant development was the Afghan National Army's operation earlier this week against the Talibs in the Dangam district of the Kunar province ... which is right down the road from Chitral. Kunar is Haqqani country..... bordering Pakistain. By any standards this is a good beginning, which needs to be built upon. While the world had legitimate concerns regarding the presence of turban sanctuaries on Pak soil, Islamabad's protestations that there were safe havens on the other side, too, seldom evoked a sympathetic response. With Hamid Maybe I'll join the TalibanKarzai ... A former Baltimore restaurateur, now 12th and current President of Afghanistan, displacing the legitimate president Rabbani in December 2004. He was installed as the dominant political figure after the removal of the Taliban regime in late 2001 in a vain attempt to put a Pashtunface on the successor state to the Taliban. After the 2004 presidential election, he was declared president regardless of what the actual vote count was. He won a second, even more dubious, five-year-term after the 2009 presidential election. His grip on reality has been slipping steadily since around 2007, probably from heavy drug use... gone, there are reasons to believe that President Ghani is sensitive to Pakistain's concerns and realises that the common enemy cannot be neutralised without wholehearted cooperation at the political and military levels. The latter breaks down into details that include operational matters and intelligence sharing. Afghanistan is in transition in more ways than one, so it would be naive to believe that there is going to be total harmony between Islamabad and Kabul on the shape of things to come. But elements that have the frightening potential to divide them are less pervasive than the multiplicity of common interests uniting them. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #1 Sorry, but unless General Sharif has control of all the Pak military, this is just window-dressing. |
| Posted by: Pappy 2014-12-25 13:45 |