New Delhi
6 March 2010
India will stay the course in Afghanistan, and continue to support reconstruction
efforts there.
"India will not scale down operations," National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon
said, rejecting media reports to the contrary.
Mr Menon was talking to reporters in Kabul as he wound up his two-day visit there.
He called on Afghan President Hamid Karzai and other leaders and officials to discuss
the security of about 4,000 Indians working on developmental projects in Afghanistan,
following the February 26 attacks in Kabul in which seven Indians, including three Major-
rank officers of the Army, were killed.
The spokesman of the Ministry of External Affairs said here that the Indian medical
missions in Afghanistan were functionally normally except for the one in Kabul, where
work has been temporarily suspended.
Of the 11-member medical team -- six doctors and five paramedics -- posted at the Indira
Gandhi Child Care Hospital in Kabul, which was set up with India's assistance, one
doctor was killed in the February 26 attacks and a few injured.
The spokesman said the Indian medical missions in Herat, Kandahar, Jalalabad and
Mazar-e-Sharif were functioning normally.
"The Embassy of India and its other offices in Afghanistan continue to function normally
in the face of extremely demanding and difficult circumstances," the spokesman noted.
On Friday, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told Parliament that the Kabul attack will not
bend the will of Indian people to help Afghanistan. He said India will continue to assist
the people of Afghanistan in "securing their legitimate right to determine their destiny in
the manner they chose without outside interference."
Prime Minister Singh is understood to have conveyed a similar message to President
Karzai through Mr Menon.
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