In his third foreign visit after trips Saudi Arabia and China, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani traveled to Pakistan on November 14 to talk about the peace that Afghanistan desperately needs. Ghani’s visit came two days after the new director general of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Lt. General Rizwan Akhtar was in Kabul for talks on the same topic.
There is a prevailing assumption in Afghanistan that when Pakistan’s army chief and ISI director-general talk about peace in Afghanistan, they simply do not mean it. This suspicion derives from the Pakistan Army and intelligence community’s decades of destabilizing engagement in Afghanistan. Ghani seems of a similar view, because in addition to meeting with President Mamnoon Hussain and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, he rushed to Army HQ in Rawalpindi to meet the powerful Chief of Army Staff General Raheel Sharif, who himself was in Kabul on October 6.
Ghani understands that the ultimate fate and success of his presidency rests on restoring basic peace and security to Afghanistan, and that the key to those issues certainly lies somewhere with Akhtar and his boss, Sharif.
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