US SECRETARY of state Rex Tillerson has made a secret trip to Afghanistan to outline the Trump administration’s new south Asia policy.
Tillerson visited Bagram air base yesterday for talks with Afghan president Ashraf Ghani, chief executive Abdullah Abdullah and other senior officials.
He also underscored the continuing US commitment to stabilising the war-torn country but stressed it was “conditions based”, meaning that the Afghan government must meet certain benchmarks.
Cloaked in secrecy and under heavy security, Tillerson slipped out of the Qatari capital Doha in the pre-dawn hours and flew into Afghanistan in a military plane on the third leg of a trip that started in Saudi Arabia.
He will visit Pakistan on today and India tomorrow.
“The US has made it clear in terms of our support for Afghanistan, support a sovereign unified Afghanistan, a democratic Afghanistan, of charting a path to peace, prosperity and self-reliance,” Tillerson told a small group of reporters in Kabul.
“It is imperative in the end that we are denying safe haven to any terrorist organisations or any extremists to any part of this world.”
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