India and Afghanistan are understood to have discussed this country’s role in the post-US Afghanistan during the two-day visit of President Hamid Karzai here earlier this week.
While information on the “fairly long” one-on-one meeting of the Afghan leader with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Thursday is yet to be made public, knowledgeable sources said it was India’s long-term engagement in all fields that held the focus in the talks.
Indian and Afghan sources expressed deep satisfaction with the outcome of Mr Karzai’s visit in the course of which bilateral and regional political and economic matrices were surveyed to mutual gratification.
The Afghans are thought to have been particularly pleased that the Leaders of Opposition in both Houses of Parliament, Sushma Swaraj and Arun Jaitley, attended the lunch thrown by Dr Singh for the Afghan dignitary, although the visit of the Afghan leader was not an official one.
US combat troops are on a tentative schedule to be withdrawn from Afghanistan in 2014, and the state of the country’s likely security scenario in the aftermath of the American departure has been a subject of concern and debate in Washington, in other key Nato capitals, and among regional players, including Pakistan, Iran, Russia and India. For about a year Mr Karzai has sought to change tack and engage Islamabad, with which he had a troubled relationship right through his period in office, for the purpose of bringing the Taliban on board for a political settlement. The Taliban enjoy sanctuary, training and military assistance in Pakistan. But the Kabul-Islamabad dialogue does not appear to have made much headway.
Well-placed sources here view the Afghan President’s visit to India as a “reassurance” exercise in the backdrop of Kabul’s recent overtures to Islamabad.
The delegation-level talks and the joint statement issued at the end of the visit suggests that the two sides look to an enhancement of India’s engagement with Afghanistan.