BEIJING: Afghanistan and China pledged a new long-term partnership with each other on Tuesday as Afghan President Ashraf Ghani began a four-day visit while Nato combat troops prepare to withdraw from his country.

“We look at China as a strategic partner, in the short term, medium term, long term and very long term,” Mr Ghani told Chinese President Xi Jinping at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People.

Mr Xi’s “vision” for the continent had opened “not just a new chapter for Asia, but an entirely new book”, he said.

Hailing Mr Ghani as “an old friend of the Chinese people”, Mr Xi said that he was prepared to work towards “a new era of cooperation in China-Afghanistan relations” to “take development to a new depth and breadth”.

China shares only a 76-kilometre border with Afghanis­tan’s remote far northeast, but has a keen interest in its neighbour’s mineral resour­ces. It has already secured major oil and copper mining concessions in Afghanistan, which is believed to have more than $1 trillion worth of mineral resources, according to studies by the US Geological Survey.

On Tuesday, Mr Ghani also pledged to help China fight Islamist extremists, a senior Chinese official said.

China says militants seeking to set up a separate state called East Turkistan in its western Xinjiang region are holed up along the Afghan-Pakistani border.

“In the area of security, President Ghani expressed the readiness and staunch support from the Afghan side in China’s fight against East Turkistan Islamic Movement terrorist forces,” Kong Xuanyou, Director General of the Foreign Ministry’s Asian Affairs Department, told journalists.

Published in Dawn, October 29th , 2014