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External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj is visiting Islamabad on December 8 to take part in the Heart of Asia Security Conference. She will be assisted by Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar and a team of officials. She is likely to call on Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and also meet his his adviser Sartaj Aziz.
Heart of Asia meet
External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj is visiting Islamabad on December 8 to take part in the Heart of Asia Security Conference. She will be assisted by Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar and a team of officials. She is likely to call on Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and also meet his his adviser Sartaj Aziz. This is being seen as the highest-level engagement between the two neighbours since the meeting of Narendra Modi and Nawaz Sharif in Ufa in July. However, the initiative fell apart as Pakistan insisted simultaneous parallel talks between national security advisers and foreign secretaries of the two countries, on all issues including Kashmir. India wanted only NSA talks to begin with. Heart of Asia conference is as part of the Istanbul Ministerial Process which was established to provide a platform to discuss regional issues, particularly encouraging security, political, and economic cooperation among Afghanistan and its neighbors. This region-led dialogue was launched in November 2011 to expand practical coordination between Afghanistan and its neighbors and regional partners in facing common threats, including counterterrorism, counternarcotics, poverty, and extremism. The declaration of the Istanbul Process on Regional Security and Cooperation for a Secure and Stable Afghanistan was adopted on November 2, 2011 at the Istanbul Conference on Afghanistan. The United States and over 20 other nations and organizations serve as “supporting nations” to the process
Seeking a new agenda for regional cooperation in the ‘Heart of Asia,’ the security conference places Afghanistan at its center and engaging the ‘Heart of Asia’ countries in sincere and result‐oriented cooperation for a peaceful and stable Afghanistan, as well as a secure and prosperous region as a whole. Fourteen countries are taking part in the deliberations. They are Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, China, India, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan Republic, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan and United Arab Emirates.
The countries participating have agreed on the following three elements: A) Political consultation involving Afghanistan and its near and extended neighbours; A sustained incremental approach to implementation of the Confidence Building Measures (CBMs) identified in the Istanbul Process document; and Seeking to contribute and bring greater coherence to the work of various regional processes and organisations, particularly as they relate to Afghanistan.
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