Members talk SAARC entry for Afghanistan

The SAARC countries are discussing taking on board Afghanistan in the seven-member regional grouping.“We have been talking to each othe...

The SAARC countries are discussing taking on board Afghanistan in the seven-member regional grouping.

“We have been talking to each other about the possibility of Afghanistan joining as a new member,” Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran, who returned from the US last night, told reporters here today.

The issue, he said, figured during the meeting of the SAARC foreign ministers on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly. All the ministers agreed that SAARC meet in Dhaka in November would be a “landmark” and that the summit should have a substantive agenda.

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“Our effort should be to move SAARC from a stage of declaratory statements to a stage of actually doing some collaborative work,” he said.

The ministers also exchanged views on setting up a poverty alleviation fund and on specific proposals dealing with disaster management in the light of tsunami that affected several SAARC nations.

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