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İstanbul hosting presidential-level trilateral summit with Afghanistan, Pakistan
The summit, which will bring together President Abdullah Gül with his Afghan counterpart, Hamid Karzai, and Pakistani counterpart, Asif Ali Zardari, is the fourth of such summits organized by Turkey. The last such trilateral summit was hosted by Turkey in early April, 2009, only days before US President Barack Obama’s visit to Ankara. In the spring of 2007 Turkey arranged a meeting between Karzai and his then-Pakistani counterpart, Pervez Musharraf, after Kabul accused Islamabad of not doing enough to stop militants from entering Afghanistan by way of Pakistan.
In early December 2008, despite rising regional tension between New Delhi and Islamabad in the aftermath of the Nov. 26 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, Ankara managed to secure another trilateral meeting between Turkey, Afghanistan and Pakistan, this time in İstanbul, for talks aimed at boosting cooperation between the two neighbors.
Intelligence and military officials from the two countries, which have a history of deep mutual mistrust, will also gather during the trilateral summit, which will focus on the training of police and security forces. Officials will also discuss whether religious imam-hatip high schools in Turkey could offer Afghanistan and Pakistan a model to prevent religious fundamentalism.
As of Sunday evening, Gül was scheduled to host a dinner in honor of Karzai and Zardari after Today’s Zaman went into print. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who was also scheduled to participate in the dinner to be hosted at İstanbul’s Tarabya Palace, was expected to have separate bilateral talks with the visiting presidents earlier on Sunday. In a related arrangement, Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç was scheduled to depart for Dubai on Sunday evening to represent Turkey at the Pakistan Investment and Public-Private Partnership Conference organized by the Friends of Democratic Pakistan (FoDP) group.
Tomorrow’s regional conference in İstanbul will pave the way for an international conference in London on Jan. 28 that may set a timetable for transferring responsibility for some areas to Afghan control.
A senior Pakistani official with knowledge of the diplomacy involving multiple governments told the Reuters news agency that initiatives were under way to begin negotiations with some factions of the Taliban and that this was likely to surface during the meetings in İstanbul and London.
“The Turks are playing a behind-the-scenes roll patching up relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan,” the official said. “There’s a lot happening behind the scenes that people don’t know about.”
In an interview with British media earlier this month in London ahead of his talks with British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu said that without reconciliation between Afghanistan’s factions, no settlement could be achieved. With 1,700 troops already deployed and a further 1,000 promised, Turkey was ready to try to persuade the Taliban to end the violence and take part in elections, Davutoğlu said at the time, without elaborating.
“The Turks are among those working on negotiations with the Taliban -- not all the Taliban, it’s being selectively done,” the same official told Reuters.
A European Union diplomat in Brussels told Reuters that he saw the meetings in Turkey as preparing the ground for the London conference.
“Clearly there are going to be a lot of contacts among all the players, including the Russians and Turkey, in the run-up to the London conference. That’s just part of preparing for a big conference like this, that I think everyone now sees as happening at a crucial time.”
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