President Ashraf Ghani in an address to the Institute of Strategic Studies in Islamabad on June 27, said that Pakistan should follow the “strategy of persuasion” in order to create a cooperation environment between the two countries as it has “strong interdependencies” with the Taliban, reports Khaama Press.
Ghani stressed the need for giving up the “bad strategy” which he believes is the repeating of past mistakes in relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan. “The strategy of persuasion allows us to develop a good strategy. In this part, Pakistan has an important role and that there are strong interdependencies between Taliban and Pakistan. We need to recognize this and arrive it programmatic approaches to move from conflict to cooperation,” Ghani explained. Ghani said he is in Pakistan as the representative of the sovereign state of Afghanistan to seek a relation of equality and cooperation between two sovereign states.Ghani said that 3,200 delegates from the Loya Jirga instructed him to normalize the relations with Pakistan. “In order to move forward, I don’t want to dwell on the past but differentiate between two types of strategies. One is a bad strategy. Bad strategy is not absent of bad strategy it is truly repeating the mistakes of the past and saying it is going to work in the future,” Ghani said.
Meanwhile, a Presidential candidate and former head of the National Directorate of Security (NDS), Rahmatullah Nabil says that President Ashraf Ghani visited Pakistan to make “secret deals, similar to the deals made ahead of the 2014 presidential elections” in Afghanistan, reports Tolo News on June 28. Taking to Twitter on June 28, Nabil said Ghani “also visited ISI headquarter with secret agenda”. Nabil said in a tweet on June 27 that the visit of President Ghani to Pakistan is “based on his tunnel vision and calculus to accommodate Pakistan’s interests to an unprecedented degree which he thinks will make Pakistan reciprocate by cooperating in peace deal with the Taliban”. Nabil further said that “Pakistani establishment does not want a stable Afghanistan, with a well-trained ANDSF”.