February 03, 2007	Saturday	Muharram 14, 1428

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PESHAWAR, Feb 2: Many months have passed since an Islamabad-Kabul bus service was proposed by the Afghanistan government, but there has been no progress on the project.

The Pakistan government has contacted Afghan authorities three or four times to hold a meeting to finalise the project. However, there has been no response from Kabul, though it itself had proposed the service about a year ago, official sources said.

Pakistan and Afghanistan already have a bus service from Peshawar to Jalalabad, which started in March.

The Pakistan government had completed its homework on the proposal to start a bus service between Islamabad and Kabul and a meeting between authorities of the two countries to formalise the proposal was supposed to be held by July 2006. However, since floating the proposal, the Afghan government had been silent on the project, the sources said.

Though Islamabad had some reservations regarding the Islamabad-Kabul bus service saying the Peshawar-Kabul bus service was more feasible, even then it kept trying to get a date from the Afghanistan government for a meeting on the matter, the sources said.

“Pakistan kept waiting for the Afghan government’s response, but there was no reply. Now, the Pakistan government believes that since it was their initiative, the Afghan authorities should contact them,” said an official.

When contacted on telephone, Foreign Office spokesperson Tasneem Aslam said she had no knowledge of latest developments on the project.

However, she said transporters running the Peshawar-Jalalabad bus service were bearing losses, so the experience was not very good.

Pakistan is home to 2.4 million Afghan refugees and illegal border crossing is common.

An official of the Regional Transport Authority also said that the number of passengers in the bus service between Peshawar and Jalalabad often remained low because of illegal border crossing.