FOREIGN Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi has done well by having a meaningful interaction with Pakistani envoys to important capitals and urging them to make concerted efforts to implement the economic agenda of the country.
In an interactive session with Pakistan’s envoys to the US, Turkey, Austria, Iran, Russia, the Netherlands and permanent representatives to New York and Geneva on Monday, he underscored growing significance of geo-economics in international politics and urged the need to project Pakistan as an attractive investment destination.
Qureshi, who has a rich background of global and regional issues and a deeper understanding of their relevance to Pakistan, remained instrumental in highlighting the cause of the country in the backdrop of India’s unilateral and illegal steps in Occupied Kashmir, fast changing situation in Afghanistan and the spectre of Islamophobia.
He successfully projected the Kashmir issue in the right perspective and as a consequence today there is greater understanding among the international community of the ground situation in the Indian occupied territory and the threat that the unresolved issue poses to regional peace and security.
Credit goes to him for convincingly putting across Pakistan’s point of view on the dispute during his frequent interactions with world leadership and local and foreign media.
Similarly, no one can deny the fact that under his leadership, the Foreign Minister played its part well in safeguarding the interests of Pakistan and making a case for Afghan people before the international community.
It was due to consistent and enthusiastic presentation of the facts and figures that brought the plight of the Afghan people to the limelight with positive response from two important forums – first the OIC Foreign Ministers’ conference that pledged meaningful cooperation to avert humanitarian disaster in Afghanistan and then adoption of the unanimous resolution by the UN Security Council to pave the way for provision of emergency humanitarian assistance to Afghan people.
It is also a reality that Shah Mahmood Qureshi and his team worked hard to streamline and strengthen cooperation with countries like Saudi Arabia, China and Iran.
His latest initiative of holding an interactive session with envoys of those countries that have economic significance for Pakistan is a step in the right direction as this would give the Minister and the senior leadership of the Ministry an idea of bottlenecks in way of promoting trade and investment with those countries and what could be done to remove them.
We hope that besides holding meetings with Pakistani diplomats, the Minister would assign specific goals to all missions and personally monitor their performance vis-à-vis trade and investment promotion.
