ISLAMABAD: After decades of conflict and instability, Afghanistan stands at an important inflection point — there was no war and the security situation in the country has improved — but there hasn’t been commensurate progress on concerns regarding the rights of women and girls and countering the threat posed by terrorist organisations, caretaker Foreign Minister Jalil Abbas Jilani said on Tuesday.

In a statement at the 27th ECO Council of Ministers meeting held at Shusha, the cultural capital of Azerbaijan, the foreign minister said he believed that the pathway to progress in Afghanistan lay through constructive engagement with the interim Afghan government.

“As friends and neighbours of Afghanistan, we, as members of the ECO, have a critical role to play to this end,” he reiterated.

The foreign minister stressed that they must leverage connectivity as a way to achieve economic revival and growth in Afghanistan, which remained a key to sustainable peace, stability and prosperity.

The caretaker foreign minister also said Pakistan attached great importance to ECO, adding that the geo-political significance of their region was enormous.

FM Jilani reiterated that the key to unlock the geo-economic potential of the ECO region lay in connectivity, saying that this objective could be achieved by taking three vital steps: (i) development of road and rail projects, (ii) liberalization of visa regimes and (iii) simplification of border procedures.

He said some of the most significant contributions of ECO had been the operationalisation of ITI road corridor, along with implementation of Transit TTFA.

Published in Dawn, October 11th, 2023