WASHINGTON: A former top Pakistani diplomat Husain Haqqani has said another high-level meeting between India and Pakistan would be fruitless unless Islamabad destroys the terrorist infrastructure on its territory or territories.
Pakistan’s insistence for talks with India is the result of the economic and international pressures on it, says former Pakistani ambassador to the United States Husain Haqqani.
His remarks made in Washington on Tuesday have come just ahead of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation or SCO Summit in Kyrgyzstan on June 13-14. Both India and Pakistan are part of the regional security grouping and leaders of both countries are set to attend the meeting in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan. No official meeting is scheduled to take place between the two leaders on the sidelines of the SCO summit.
In a letter written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi last week, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan had requested to resume talks between the two countries to resolve all differences.
Supporting India’s determination that “talks and terror” cannot go together, Haqqani said another high-level meeting between India and Pakistan would be meaningless unless it is accompanied with dismantling of terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan and giving up the notion of the two countries being “permanent enemies”. “Between 1950 and December 2015, when Prime Minister Modi dropped in on (then) Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in Lahore, leaders of the two countries have met 45 times talks have never led to durable peace between two countries.”
(Agencies)
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