LAHORE: National Assembly (NA) Speaker Sardar Ayaz Sadiq has said that the government will complete its tenure and next general elections will be held according the schedule.
Talking to media in Lahore on Sunday, Ayaz said that government’s term will complete on first June next year and elections will be held after ninety days of the caretaker government.
To a question, he said that peace in the region is linked with the peace in Afghanistan. The speaker, who recently led a parliamentary delegation during a visit to Kabul, said that the issue of fencing on the Pak-Afghan border was raised with the Afghan leadership but no positive response was received from the other side.
Ayaz said that the fencing is in the best interest of both the countries to stop illegal cross border movement. He said that Pakistan has started fencing its borders and over 1,000 posts have been established. He urged Afghanistan to co-operate so as to improve border security. Clarifying a report, he explained that the Afghan president had not declined invitations extended to him by top Pakistani officials, as Ghani’s Deputy Spokesperson Dawa Khan Minapal had said last week.
Ayaz said that Afghan President Ashraf Ghani assured the speaker he would visit Pakistan once Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif paid a reciprocal visit to Afghanistan. The Afghan president last paid an official visit to Pakistan in Dec 2015 for the Heart of Asia moot. The speaker said that he had invited the Afghan president to Islamabad so that relations between the two countries may improve. “It is his [Ghani’s] desire as well that the relations improve and peace is established,” Sadiq added.
He said that during his meeting in Kabul, the Afghan president told him that 50 percent of Afghan land is not under his control. He said that former Afghan president Hamid Karzai and Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah will be visiting Pakistan soon. “When [Afghanistan’s] parliamentary delegation comes we will talk to them about our soldiers being attacked [in Chaman],” he quoted them as having said.
