Security officials of Central Asian countries, Pakistan, India, and China are invited to attend a security summit on Afghanistan in Moscow next week, Russia’s Special Envoy to Afghanistan, Zamir Kabulov, confirmed on Friday to the Russian TASS news agency.
It in unclear whether the Taliban has been invited to attend.
The Taliban are apparently not invited to attend the meeting as Kabulov has not commented whether the group, which currently rules Afghanistan, would attend it or not.
“There will be regional participants, the secretaries of the security councils of countries in the region are invited – our Central Asian partners, as well as Pakistan, India and China,” Kabulov told TASS.
The meeting comes after Kabulov visits to Kabul and Islamabad where he held talks with Taliban and Pakistani officials.
In Kabul, the Taliban foreign minister had told him that the group was listening to Russia on forming an “inclusive government” and “human right issues”, adding that Russia had a “special importance” for the Taliban’s foreign policy.
In Islamabad, Kabulov held talks with Hina Rabbani Khar, Pakistan’s Minister of State for Foreign Affairs and with the country’s special representative for Afghanistan affairs, Mohammad Sadiq Khan, discussing regional security.
In November 2022, Moscow hosted a regional consultative meeting between 11 special representatives from the region. On May 27, 2022, a fourth round of multilateral consultations on Afghanistan between top security officials was held in Dushanbe.
