Pakistan will host a trilateral dialogue with China and Afghanistan in Islamabad on Friday following the arrival of Chinese and Afghan foreign ministers Qin Gang and Mawlawi Amir Khan Muttaqi.
Besides attending the fifth round of trilateral dialogue between the three countries on Saturday, the two foreign ministers will also participate in bilateral talks with their Pakistani counterpart Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari.
Muttaqi, Afghanistan’s interim foreign minister, was granted a travel ban waiver by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) earlier this month allowing him to travel to Pakistan. He has long been subject to a travel ban, asset freeze and arms embargo under UNSC sanctions.
“The government of Afghanistan wants to hold comprehensive talks on bilateral political-commercial relations, regional stability and transit between Afghanistan and Pakistan,” Ziad Ahmad Takkal, deputy spokesman for the foreign ministry, said on Friday. afghan
While this will be the Chinese foreign minister’s first visit to Pakistan, Muttaqi last traveled to Pakistan in November 2021, just months after the Afghan Taliban seized control in Kabul.
The Afghan minister’s visit to Pakistan comes the same week the UN hosted a conference on Afghanistan in Doha, Qatar, without inviting the country’s Taliban rulers.
In this photo provided by the Afghan Embassy in Pakistan, Taliban-designated Foreign Minister Mawlawi Amir Khan Muttaqi, center, walks with other officials upon his arrival in Islamabad, Pakistan, May 5 of 2023. [Afghanistan Embassy in Pakistan via AP]
At the Doha conference on May 2, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres condemned the Taliban’s suppression of women’s rights in Afghanistan, including the ban on education.
“Let me be very clear, we will never remain silent in the face of unprecedented systemic attacks on the rights of women and girls. We will always speak out when millions of women and girls are silenced and erased from view,” Guterres said.
The UN chief said categorically that the Taliban would not be recognized as the rulers of Afghanistan.
“The meeting was about developing a common international approach, not about recognizing de facto Taliban authorities,” Guterres told reporters in Doha.
Pakistan maintains close ties with its neighbor to the north-west. The two countries share a 2,600 km (1,660 mi) long border, also known as the Durand Line. However, Muttaqi’s visit comes at a time when Pakistan has seen a dramatic increase in violent attacks in the northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the southwestern province of Balochistan, both of which border Afghanistan.
Pakistani authorities allege that the attacks are launched from Afghan territory by Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), an armed group ideologically aligned with the Afghan Taliban. However, despite the terse exchange of words between the authorities of both countries, Pakistan has continued to hold talks with the Afghan Taliban without officially recognizing them as the country’s legitimate government.
‘Positive progress’
In his speech to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in India on Friday, Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Bhutto-Zardari urged the international community to “significantly engage” with the Afghan interim government.
“After being the playing field of great powers time and time again, we owe it to the people of Afghanistan not to repeat the mistakes of the past,” he said in the speech in the Indian city of Goa.
Abdul Syed, an expert on Pakistan and Afghanistan, said Muttaqi’s visit to Islamabad was an important development in relations between the two countries, especially in light of recent tensions.
“After repeated attacks by TTP in recent months and the police line [an area in the city where important government installations are located] bombing in Peshawar in January this year, Pakistan raised objections to the Afghan government. But they received curt replies from Muttaqi. So for him to make this visit now can be seen as a softening of the stance and positive progress,” Syed told Al Jazeera in Sweden.
China, the third participant in the dialogue, also has important interests in the other two countries.
Beijing is Pakistan’s key economic and defense partner and has invested heavily in Pakistan, spearheading $60 billion in the ambitious China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) project. However, multiple attacks by armed groups have targeted Chinese nationals and their interests in Pakistan in recent years.
China has asked Pakistan to ensure the safety of its citizens and investments.
Chinese companies are also investing in Afghanistan.
A Chinese company signed a multibillion-dollar investment deal in January this year, the first significant foreign investment in the country since August 2021, when the Taliban took control.
In March 2022, then-Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi also made a surprise visit to Kabul where he met with Taliban leaders “to discuss various issues, including the extension of political relations, economic cooperation and traffic”.
Some observers believe that Chinese involvement in Afghanistan has more to do with security concerns than economic interests.
Aamer Raza, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Peshawar, told Al Jazeera that China’s main concern in Afghanistan is to minimize the threat posed by the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), which is the reason for which Beijing continues to relate to the Afghan Taliban. .
ETIM is an armed group affiliated with Al-Qaeda that has carried out attacks against China in its pursuit of the creation of “East Turkestan” in mainland China.
“China has maintained its diplomatic presence … with the Afghan contact group and other multilateral forums under the SCO and beyond, which means the Chinese are well placed to at least mitigate immediate security threats Raza told Al Jazeera.
In the wake of the UN conference in Doha, which excluded the Taliban, Raza believes that not engaging with Afghanistan’s leadership is unproductive.
“Regardless of what the UN has done, there is a need to socialize the Taliban into international norms without extending them full diplomatic recognition. In the absence of domestic opposition and sufficient regional support, the policy of non-involvement will hardly have the desired impacts,” he said.
Syed said that despite security concerns and exchanges of difficult words, Pakistan and Afghanistan need each other.
“It is a political necessity for Islamabad to maintain ties with Kabul, given that the Afghan Taliban are trying to improve relations with other regional countries and Pakistan cannot afford to ignore them,” he said.
“Equally, however, the Afghan Taliban also realize that whatever diplomatic progress they make in the region, it is imperative that they maintain cordial ties with Pakistan.”
