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Afghans to share intel with Pakistan on Taliban
Pakistan and Afghanistan will share intelligence about the whereabouts of Taliban and Al Qaeda activists inside Pakistan and are devising a mechanism to ensure that subversive elements were firmly dealt with, the Afghan Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah said.

Talking to Daily Times, the Afghan foreign minister said that there were no two opinions about the presence of Taliban on Pakistani soil.

The issue, he said, was how to deal with the threat and how to fight the “common enemy”, he said, adding that the issue had been discussed by Pakistani and Afghan leaders during the current round of talks. He said that security remained the main focus of the talks between President Hamid Karzai and President Pervez Musharraf. “I think this visit provided the best opportunity to find solutions to these issues,” he said. Abdullah said that Pakistan had raised the issue of border incursions during the talks and it was also discussed in detail. He rejected Pakistan’s proposal to fence the border between the two countries as a way of curtailing cross-border incursions.

“A fence or wall is something which separates nations. We are living in an age where we need to build bridges, not walls,” he said. “On Thursday, President Karzai addressed the National Defence College, where he was asked about this proposal by one of the participants,” he said. “Al Qaeda doesn’t have a base in Afghanistan anymore,” he said, adding, “Although there are groups linked to Al Qaeda carrying out suicide attacks in Afghanistan, they don’t have a base there anymore,” he said.

He said Afghanistan was a global base of operations for Al Qaeda before September 11, and they controlled almost 90 percent of the country. “However, the situation has completely changed now,” he said.

The Afghan minister said that his government was in the process of developing close relations with all countries in the region, including India and Pakistan. “Our relations with India are very important to us,” he said. “Expanding our relations with Pakistan, India and Iran and the rest of the world is our number one priority,” he said. He rejected a comparison with Iraq, saying that there was a clear-cut difference between the situation of the two countries. “Of course, the situation in Afghanistan is different, and calling it ‘occupation’ would be incorrect,” he said. “The presence of international forces in Afghanistan has helped its people rebuild their homeland,” he said.

In response to a question about Afghanistan acting as a channel between energy-rich Central Asia and South Asia, the Afghan foreign minister said that things had changed and now there was enough stability in Afghanistan to make trade with other countries in the region possible.
Posted by: Dan Darling 2006-02-18
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=143026