MONITORING (SW) – Chinese President Xi Jinping Sunday held wide-ranging bilateral talks with visiting Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan in which they stressed the urgency of providing enhanced international aid to Afghanistan to help it avert a looming humanitarian crisis.
The meeting marked the culmination of a four-day visit to Beijing, where Khan was among foreign leaders invited to witness Friday’s opening ceremony of the Winter Olympic Games.
A post-meeting joint statement said that China and Pakistan “called upon the international community to provide continued and enhanced assistance and support to Afghanistan including through unfreezing of Afghanistan’s financial assets.”
“The two sides are ready to discuss with Afghanistan the extension of CPEC to Afghanistan,” the statement said, referring to a multi-billion-dollar investment program known as the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.
CPEC is hailed as a flagship of Beijing’s global Belt and Road Initiative, which builds roads, power plants and other infrastructure projects in Pakistan with Chinese investments, reported the VOA.
When the Taliban took control of Afghanistan last August, wide-ranging international sanctions dating back to the Islamist group’s first time in power from 1996 to 2001 followed.
The Taliban’s return to power prompted the United States and other Western nations to immediately freeze more than $9.5 billion in Afghan central bank’s assets, mostly held in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
The sanctions have pushed the heavily aid-dependent Afghan economy to the brink of collapse and exacerbated a simmering humanitarian crisis in the conflict-torn South Asian nation, where the United Nations estimates around 24 million people, or more than half of the population, face acute hunger.
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