Middle East Focus-Arabia Deserta: Ahmadinejad Does Kabul, Beats Obama and the Oligarchs………

Arabia Deserta

Ahmadinejad Does Kabul, Beats Obama and the Oligarchs………

“Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is to head to Afghanistan on Wednesday, his first trip to Tehran's eastern neighbour since the re-election last August of his counterpart Hamid Karzai. "The president is going on Wednesday" to Afghanistan, foreign ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast told reporters at his weekly press conference…… Ahmadinejad and several Iranian officials have repeatedly called for the withdrawal of US-led forces from Afghanistan, saying their presence was stoking the Taliban insurgency. But despite their rivalry, Washington and Tehran are both sworn enemies of the extremist Sunni Muslim militia which ruled in Kabul from 1996, before being overthrown in the 2001 US-led invasion…….. Shiite Iran, which has close ethnic and religious ties with Afghanistan, has long suffered from the effects of opium production in its neighbour, with easily available heroin fuelling a big rise in drug use at home. Afghanistan is the source of 90 percent of the world's heroin………”

Quiz time: when was the last time President Obama went to Kabul? When was the last time Pakistan’s president or Saudi Arabia’s king (or foreign minister) went to Kabul?
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