A presidential candidate and former head of the National Directorate of Security, Rahmatullah Nabil says that President Ashraf Ghani visited Pakistan to make “secret deals, similar to the deals made ahead of the 2014 presidential elections” in Afghanistan.
Ghani is on a two-day visit in Pakistan where he visited Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan and other senior officials as well as political leaders in that country and stressed the need for creating a cooperation environment between the two nations.
Taking to Twitter on Friday, Nabil said Ghani “also visited ISI headquarter with secret agenda”.
Nabil said in a tweet on June 27 that the visit of President Ghani to Pakistan is “based on his tunnel vision and calculus to accommodate Pakistan’s interests to an unprecedented degree which he thinks will make Pakistan reciprocate by cooperating in peace deal with the Taliban”.
He said that instead of focusing on coercing the undeclared state hostilities of Pakistan, Ghani is approaching Pakistan by “making secret deals” with the Pakistani establishment.
He said similar deal was made in 2014 prior to the election, in which Pakistan was given unilateral leverage, without getting anything for Afghanistan “except bloodshed and infringement of our national sovereignty and territorial integrity.
Nabil said in another tweet that Ghani is “disparate to remain in power even setting on the skulls of thousands of the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces and the Afghan people”.
President Ghani, who addressed the Strategic Studies Institute in Islamabad, said that he is taking his mandate from the people, not from the political elites.
Nabil further said that “Pakistani establishment does not want a stable Afghanistan, with a well-trained ANDSF”.
Ghani said that he had constructive discussions in Pakistan which mainly focused on cooperation between two states.
He said that Pakistan should follow the “strategy of persuasion” in order to create a cooperation environment between the two countries as it has “strong interdependencies” with the Taliban.
Ghani stressed the need for giving up the “bad strategy” which he believes is the repeating of past mistakes in relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
“The strategy of persuasion allows us to develop a good strategy. In this part, Pakistan has an important role and that there are strong interdependencies between Taliban and Pakistan. We need to recognize this and arrive it programmatic approaches to move from conflict to cooperation,” Ghani explained.
Ghani said he is in Pakistan as the representative of the sovereign state of Afghanistan to seek a relation of equality and cooperation between two sovereign states.
Ghani went to Lahore, the capital of Punjab province, during his visit to Pakistan, on Friday afternoon where he will address investors about new investment and trade opportunities in the region, the Presidential Palace said in a statement.
According to the Presidential Palace, Ghani held separate meetings with a number of Pakistani politicians in Islamabad, including Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, Shehbaz Sharif, Maryam Nawaz, Aftab Ahmad Khan Sherpao, Siraj ul Haq, and Fazal-ur-Rehman.