"Premature to name Afghan leader for the Wales Summit"

Javed Hamem Kakar

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization NATO has stated that it was premature to say who would represent Afghanistan in the forth coming NATO Summit in the Wales next month.

The Wales in the UK would host the two day summit from September 4, 2014. President Hamid Karzai has been attending NATO summits so far but his term in the office has ended and Afghanistan expects a new president to take charge soon. In the 2012 Chicago Summit, NATO assured lasting aid to Afghanistan. These gatherings of the world leaders are of vital importance to the ware ravaged Afghanistan.

An official in the NATO headquarters Brussels told Pajhwok Afghan News on Saturday that it was too early to say who would represent Afghanistan in this summit.

NATO would devise its future Afghan strategy in the Wales Summit. Earlier it was hoped that the new Afghan president would have signed bilateral security pacts with the United States and NATO prior to this summit pawing a way for the two to chalk out their post 2014 aid and assistance strategies.

Hamid Karzai had been reluctant to sign the security pacts while both the presidential candidates Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah have expressed willingness to sign the agreements.

Afghan election process has come to a standstill at a crucial time when two important global conferences are about to resume. Few weeks after the NATO’s Wales Summit, the United Nations General Assembly would convene its annual meeting. It is becoming an increasingly pressing and awkward question for NATO, seeking to withdraw most of its troops, as who, if anyone, will represent Afghanistan at next month's NATO summit.

The news agency quoted some diplomats as saying that President Karzai could be invited, or pick who represents the country, at Celtic Manor in Wales on Sept. 4-5, but the prospect of Karzai's participation raises technical problems – the constitution deems his term is already complete.

It also risks upsetting the United States, with whom Karzai has had a fraught relationship, and complicating the signing of two agreements that would allow the United States and NATO to keep some soldiers in Afghanistan for training and counter-insurgency operations.