Pakistan rejects Afghan allegations

{image-pakistan flag_15072008.jpg news.oneindia.in}Islamabad, Jul 15: Pakistan on Tuesday, July 15, rejected as 'baseless', the allegations levelled against its intelligence agencies and armed forces by Afghan President Hamid Karzai and its Cabinet.

Mr Karzai today directly accused Pakistan's intelligence agency, ISI, of a role in a series of deadly attacks, including the bombing of the Indian embassy last week. ''Pakistani agents were behind the killing of two women in Ghazni province and 24 people in a suicide bomb in Uruzgan province on Sunday,'' Mr Karzai said.

He vowed to take revenge for these 'two sisters of ours very soon... and we are telling the enemies of Afghanistan that we will protect the honour of this country.' ''Such baseless accusations serve no purpose other than vitiating bilateral atmosphere and creating an artificial crisis in Pak-Afghan relations,'' Foreign Ministry spokesman Muhammad Sadiq said in a statement here today.

He regretted the decision by the Afghan Cabinet to suspend important forthcoming bilateral and regional meetings on such flimsy grounds.

Afghan Cabinet yesterday decided to boycott a series of upcoming meetings with Pakistan unless 'bilateral trust' was restored.

''It ignores the importance of economic cooperation to the improvement in the overall living conditions of the people of Afghanistan that has implications for the overall security situation as well,'' Mr Sadiq added.

In Pakistan's view, the spokesman said, the abiding interests of Pak-Afghan relations and the need for credible partnership in the common struggle against terrorism and militancy should transcend short-term political expediencies and point scoring.

''Pakistan hopes that Afghanistan will do some rethinking and desist from such provocative statements and initiation of blame game,'' he added.

UNI