Islamabad, Dec 6 (IANS) Afghan President Hamid Karzai has said that Pakistan’s boycott of the Bonn conference on the future of Afghanistan will not affect bilateral cooperation.
‘We very much wished Pakistan to attend Bonn conference. It would have been a good opportunity for Pakistan to speak its mind, to convey its message to the world on Afghanistan,’ Karzai said.
‘And how they would like to see things to move forward, but unfortunately they did not come,’ Karzai said in an interview with Geo TV, broadcast Tuesday, Xinhua reported.
Karzai said that Pakistan’s boycott of the Bonn conference ‘will not stop us from cooperating, this will not stop us from working together’.
Pakistan kept away from the conference in protest against the Nov 26 NATO bombing on its two border posts that killed 24 soldiers and injured 13 others.
World leaders, including host German Chancellor Angela Markel and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, had appealed to Pakistan to change its decision, but Islamabad held firm and stayed away from the one-day conference Monday.
Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar told her German counterpart late Monday that her country would carefully examine the Bonn declaration, according to a foreign ministry statement Tuesday.
