Afghanistan proposed a joint investigation with Pakistan into the assassination of Afghan leader Burhanuddin Rabbani, but the Pakistanis rejected their offer this week.
Afghan leaders pushed their Pakistani counterparts to set up a joint commission to investigate the death of former president Burhanuddin Rabbani on both sides of their disputed border, The Globe and Mail has learned, but the Pakistan delegation rejected the idea during private meetings in Istanbul this week.
The idea emerged as part of a diplomatic effort to ease tensions between the South Asian neighbours in the wake of Mr. Rabbani's assassination in Kabul on Sept. 20, but Pakistani officials said they could not accept the proposal because it would have violated their constitution.
"Our country's law does not allow any foreigner to come and investigate on our side," Rehman Malik, Pakistan's Interior Minister, said in an interview.
Mr. Malik suggested an alternative plan that became the centrepiece of the summit's concluding remarks on Tuesday afternoon, as the two countries reached a limited agreement to co-operate on the Rabbani investigation. The vaguely worded statement promises that security services on both sides of the border will look into the killing separately, while sharing information. The deal fell short of Afghan expectations, but diplomats said they were delighted to get the countries talking again, marking a thaw in frosty relations across one of the world's most dangerous frontiers.
"All of the investigative leads provided to us shall be investigated by Pakistan, and we will share investigative leads with Afghanistan," Mr. Malik said.
An Afghan intelligence official said he was skeptical about Pakistan's promises, noting that such pledges of co-operation have proven hollow in the past.
Delegates from Afghanistan's secret police, the National Directorate for Security, presented their Pakistani colleagues with an intelligence dossier that was described by one official as supporting Kabul's accusation that Pakistan had hosted Mr. Rabbani's killers in the southern city of Quetta.
Such claims, so far unproven, have widened the trust gap between Kabul and Islamabad in the weeks after a suicide bomber posing as an emissary from the Taliban killed Mr. Rabbani at his home. At the time, the white-bearded senior statesman was serving as head of the Afghan Peace Council and represented Kabul's main effort at negotiating with the Taliban.
Afghanistan briefly froze all discussions with Pakistan after the incident and called off attempts at peace talks with the insurgency. Turkish diplomats claimed a modest victory by bringing the two countries back together for their sixth trilateral summit, including Turkey, which kicks off a season of political talks about the troubled region. Pakistan's top military and intelligence officers also attended the event, along with officials from the State Bank of Pakistan, who accepted a $1-billion currency swap from Turkey to ease their country's liquidity problems.
Despite renewing talks with his neighbour, Afghan President Hamid Karzai reiterated that he still does not see any point in negotiating with the Taliban.
"We cannot keep talking to suicide bombers, therefore we have stopped talking about talking to the Taliban until we have an address for the Taliban," Mr. Karzai said.
A senior diplomat said Mr. Karzai appeared to get along well with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari during the meetings behind closed doors, although other sessions involving military and intelligence officials were apparently more tense. There was no sign of discord in public, amid the carved stone halls of a five-star hotel on the shores of the Bosphorus.
Mr. Karzai and Mr. Zardari appeared bemused when Turkish President Abdullah Gul hopped into the driver's seat of a black Mercedes S600 to chauffeur them between meetings, and during the final press conference they made a show of offering each other the microphone.
Mr. Gul noted that the atmospherics had improved since the 2007 summit between Mr. Karzai and former Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf in Washington, when the two men refused to look at each other before sitting down to dinner.
"Everybody spoke with great openness and sincerity," the Turkish President said.
Diplomats are hoping that the talks between Afghanistan and Pakistan have allowed the two countries to set aside some of their animosity ahead of a bigger meeting scheduled for Wednesday. Representatives from 14 regional countries will be joined by other international delegates for talks focused on Afghanistan's security. Canada is expected to be represented by Deepak Obhrai, parliamentary secretary for Foreign Affairs.
The Istanbul meetings are a prelude to the so-called "Bonn+10" conference in December, which will bring together more than 1,000 delegates from 90 nations and international agencies, a decade after the Bonn Agreement that gave birth to the new government in Kabul. It's hoped that the flurry of discussions will set the conditions for an orderly transition as international forces hand over responsibility to Afghan forces by 2014.