External Affairs Minister S M Krishna will meet his Afghan counterpart Zalmay Rassoul here on Wednesday. They are likely to exchange views in the situation in Afghanistan and discuss issues related to India’s assistance in reconstruction of the war-ravaged country.
The Afghan Foreign Minister is on a three-day visit to India. He called on Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Tuesday and is expected to have a meeting with National Security Advisor Shivshankar Menon on Wednesday. Rassoul landed in New Delhi just a day after “The Washington Post” published an article written by the Afghan NSA, accusing Pakistan’s military-intelligence establishment of mentoring the terrorists in Afghanistan.
In an obvious disapproval of US-Pakistan ties on the issue of Afghanistan, Spanta wrote that the task to deal with the terrorists had been “compounded by another strategic failure: the mistaken embrace of ‘strategic partners’ who had, in fact, been nurturing terrorism.” “While we are losing dozens of men and women to terrorist attacks every day, the terrorists’ main mentor continues to receive billions of dollars in aid and assistance. How is this fundamental contradiction justified?” wrote the Afghan NSA. He also accused Pakistan of providing sanctuary and support to terror groups like “Quetta Shura, the Haqqani network, the Hekmatyar group and al-Qaeda”.
Spanta’s article came just a few weeks after WikiLeaks’ exposure of US intelligence report on the support provided by Pakistani Inter Services Intelligence to the terrorists in Afghanistan. “He has been very straightforward and unambiguous to express what he has to express. All these were known to us since long back,” a senior government official said in New Delhi.
DH News Service
