Iranian president likely to visit Pakistan

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is likely to pay a visit to Pakistan next week to discuss expansion of bilateral economic, defense and energy ties in meetings with senior Islamabad officials.Ahmadinejad's visit to Pakistan will be in response to the visits of President Asif Ali Zardari to Tehran in recent months to enhance bilateral ties. Zardari's latest visit to Iran was in June this year to participate in the trilateral summit of Iranian, Afghan and Pakistani presidents. In the summit, the three neighbors decided to expand and strengthen cooperation for regional peace, stability and development. The next trilateral meeting was supposed to be held in Islamabad this time around, but owing to the prevailing tensions between Pakistan and Afghanistan the meeting has been delayed. "It will be, hence, a bilateral visit of the Iranian president to Islamabad during which he would deliberate not only on the expansion of bilateral ties in the defence and economy sectors, but also discuss the regional and global situation with Pakistani leaders with a focus on Afghanistan and the current row between Islamabad and Washington," said a diplomatic source in Islamabad on Tuesday while requesting anonymity. The Iranian president's last visit to Pakistan was a brief one, when he made a stopover in Islamabad on his way to Sri Lanka in April 2008. General Pervez Musharraf was the Pakistani president then and during the meeting between him and Ahmadinejad, the two countries agreed to move ahead with the $ 7.5 billion Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) gas pipeline project despite opposition from the United States.