Ahead of its President Hamid Karzai’s visit next week, the Afghan has asked India to supply lethal defence hardware as part of an intensified bilateral cooperation and even seemed to indicate that it would welcome troop deployment on its soil.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai will be arriving in New Delhi on Monday for a three-day visit, his second in six months, but at a crucial juncture with only a year left for the foreign troops pullout from Afghanistan.
Vigorously batting for a stepped-up Indian role, Afghan Ambassador to India Shaida Mohammad Abdali said, “Investment in the security of Afghanistan is in India’s interest.”
He noted that while India had been training Afghan security personnel, it was not adequate to address the issues of a difficult security situation.
“Given the time, we are required to sit down and discuss the contours of our defence cooperation to ensure predictability,” he said, adding that current level of cooperation was hardly enough to “take preventive and pre-emptive action” against common threats.
India has so far been training Afghan security personnel only in Indian institutions. It has also supplied limited number of non-lethal equipment like jeeps and trucks and plans to hand over transport helicopters.
“So, we would like to have both lethal and non-lethal assistance to our forces in Afghanistan,” he said.
Better engagement in defence cooperation is likely to be a major topic of discussion during Karzai’s visit, which will also see him travelling to Jalandhar to receive a doctorate from a university.
Abdali said Pakistan had to realise that India was building institutions in Afghanistan, which would ensure that terrorism wouldn’t come back and affect the war-torn country even more. He said India’s cooperation in Afghanistan would ultimately serve Pakistan’s national interests too.
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