‘Cut in aid to trigger migration to Pakistan’

Islamabad : Asif Durrani, Pakistan’s former Special Representative for Afghanistan, has expressed serious concerns over the US decision to halt economic assistance to Afghanistan.

Mr Durrani was speaking at a roundtable discussion organised her by Institute of Regional Studies (IRS).

Mr Durrani shared that half of Afghans were dependent on international humanitarian assistance who might be forced to migrate to Pakistan because of extreme poverty with the stoppage of US economic assistance, he said adding that we need to be prepared for such an eventuality.

He further said that the Taliban government had already informed its employees that they would not be getting salaries for the coming three months.

Appreciating the Taliban government, he shared that corruption and poppy cultivation reduced in Afghanistan but the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) reported an increase of 19 per cent in poppy cultivation last year.

He cautioned that poppy cultivation could rise if the dire economic situation of Afghanistan remained unchanged.

He observed that the immediate neighbours of Afghanistan and Russia were sustaining Afghanistan through currency swaps and border trade but warned that it was not enough for a full economic recovery of a country as large as Afghanistan.

Mr Durrani termed the relationship between Afghanistan and Pakistan as different from the relations either country had with any of its other neighbours.

The people of Afghanistan related with Pakistan in a way they did not with the people of any other neighbouring country, he added.

Emphasising the historical, cultural and ethnic context of the Pak-Afghan relations, he urged the Government of Pakistan to also take a holistic sociocultural approach towards Afghanistan instead of treating it as a bureaucratic exercise. He questioned why do we issue 3,000 visas a day to Afghans.

Speaking on the occasion, Aarish U Khan, IRS, expressed hope for improvement of economic relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Referring to the recent US announcement to rescinded certain waivers to sanctions against Iran including the ones accorded to the Chabahar Port, he argued that it will make Afghanistan more reliant on Pakistan’s ports for trade with the rest of the world.

In his concluding remarks, Jauhar Saleem, President, IRS, called on both the governments to tap into the potential of people-to-people and business-to-business relations rooted in the longstanding historical and cultural connections between the two countries.