Ajit Doval’s visit to the Tajikistan capital to meet his counterparts of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation would be the National Security Advisor’s first public face-to-face encounter with his Pakistani counterpart. Tajikistan, the current president of the SCO, is hosting the conference of national security advisors of the eight member states at Dushanbe on June 22-23.
India and Pakistan have been members of this regional group since June 2016. Apart from India, NSAs from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan also participated in the meeting. Pakistani National Security Advisor Moeed W. Yusuf is scheduled to attend the conference as well. The key agenda of the NSA conference in Dushanbe would be to discuss the volatile situation in Afghanistan, where the number of attacks by Taliban and Daesh (or ISIS) have gone up, even as foreign troops are continuing their withdrawal from Afghan soil. The meeting also discussed cooperation between member states in ensuring reliable information security, the joint fight against cybercrime, and the issues of biological security and food security in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The full name of SCO is Shanghai Cooperation Organization. This organization tries to increase socio-economic cooperation. Its role was created in 1991 after the dissolution of the USSR. India became a full-time member of this organization in 2017.
