Afghan, NATO, Pakistani commanders to meet

Islamabad said Afghan, NATO and Pakistani commanders were holding talks Wednesday to improve border coordination, more than two months after a lethal NATO attack flung relations into a major crisis. It was the latest sign that Pakistan is moving to repair relations with Afghanistan and the United States, which plummeted to an all-time low after US air strikes on November 26 killed 24 Pakistani soldiers. The Pakistani army said representatives of the Afghan and Pakistani armies, and NATO's US-led force in Afghanistan were meeting at a border coordination center at Torkham on Wednesday. Major General Ishfaq Nadeem Ahmed, the Pakistan army's director general of military operations, was attending the talks, it said. "The meeting is part of tripartite engagement to discuss and improve various coordination measures on the Pakistan-Afghan border," the army added. General Carsten Jacobson, spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Kabul, told AFP he was unaware of the talks. Last week, Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar went to Kabul on a fence-mending visit and then indicated that Islamabad could shortly re-open its Afghan border to NATO supplies, reversing a blockade imposed on November 26.