ISI chief visits Afghanistan to mend strained relations

The head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency arrived in Kabul yesterday to meet Afghan security officials just a day after Pakistan’s military pushed back a militant attack at two posts on the border with Afghanistan.Naveed Mukhtar’s visit also came a day after a delegation from the Pakistani parliament met Afghan President Ashraf Ghani in what was called a trust-building visit.An Afghan Presidential Palace official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the purpose of the ISI chief’s visit was to mend the broken trust between the two countries.“Pakistan has never done anything to win Afghanistan’s trust,” the source said, adding that the Afghan government will be careful and hereafter “not take steps blindly.”“We will be looking suspiciously at each step taken by Pakistan,” the official said.The ISI chief had no plans to meet the Afghan president, the official said.A Pakistani parliamentary delegation arrived in Kabul on a two-day visit on Saturday to ease tensions after months of strained ties due to the closure of major border crossings by the Pakistani military.The group invited Abdullah Abdullah, Afghanistan’s chief executive, to visit Pakistan.Abdullah’s office said he had accepted the invitation, but there was no date set yet.Meanwhile, the Pakistani army on Monday pushed back an attack from militants at two border posts, the country’s military said in a statement.Terrorists attacked two Pakistani border posts in the South Wazirstan tribal region, the military’s media wing said in a statement.“Three terrorists were killed (and) a number of others were injured during intense exchanges of fire,” the statement said.Afghanistan accuses Pakistan of providing sanctuary for the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network on its soil, while Pakistan accuses Afghanistan of sheltering the Pakistani Taliban.The Pakistani military closed the border on February 16 after a suicide bomber, allegedly from a militant group operating out of Afghanistan, killed nearly 90 people at Sufi Islam’s most revered shrine in Pakistan.The border closure had left hundreds of thousands of people stranded alongside lorries carrying food and other goods at the two major crossings of Torkham and Chamman.In March, Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif took the decision to reopen the border crossings after security officials from Pakistan and Afghanistan met in London for talks to address each other’s concerns about alleged terrorist hideouts in the border regions.