Wednesday 5 October 2011

INDIA-AFGHANISTAN

India Real Time

POLITICS JOURNAL: INDIA’S AGREEMENT WITH AFGHANISTAN

Jyoti Malhotra

IndiaRealTime, October 5, 2011

India and Afghanistan signed a strategic partnership in Delhi Tuesday, just a few days after Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s office accused a Pakistani citizen of carrying out a suicide attack against former president and peace envoy Burhanuddin Rabbani last month.

The partnership, which was signed after Mr. Karzai met with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, involves India training Afghan security forces. This takes ties between Delhi and Kabul to a new level, beyond the economic reconstruction that India has been very careful to focus on in the last decade since the Americans returned to Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. It is the first such agreement Afghanistan has with any country, including the U.S.

“The people of Afghanistan have suffered enough. They deserve to live in peace and decide their future themselves, without outside interference, coercion and intimidation,” Mr. Singh told the media Tuesday evening.

Mr. Karzai said he hoped South Asia would, one day, be able to live in peace where “radicalism is not used as an instrument of state policy.”

The partnership agreement specifically calls for India “to assist, as mutually determined, in the training, equipping and capacity-building programmes for Afghan national security forces,” representing a significant scaling up of India’s intention to enhance its presence in Afghanistan.

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