Thursday, November 27, 2008
President Hamid Karzai is seeking a time line for ending the war.
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Afghanistan’s president sharply critiqued the seven-year Afghan war Wednesday, complaining that U.S. and NATO troops haven’t made life better. The criticism came a day after he accused foreign forces of undermining him with a “parallel government” in the countryside.
The back-to-back barbs aimed at the international community’s handling of the fight with the Taliban and the rebuilding of Afghanistan underlined President Hamid Karzai’s increasing frustration with a conflict that has gotten bloodier each year.
“We haven’t accepted the international community so our lives would get worse. We accepted them so our lives would get better,” Karzai said Wednesday. “We can accept some destruction — even some civilian casualties — if we have hope for a future of security and peace ... but this [style of] fighting can’t be the only way forever.”
During a meeting Tuesday with a U.N. Security Council delegation, Karzai called for the international community to set a time line for ending the war, although he didn’t mention a specific date. He asked how — given the number of countries involved and the amount of money spent in Afghanistan — “a little force like the Taliban can continue to exist, continue to flourish.”
The president expanded on that idea Wednesday during a joint news conference with NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, saying he was not asking for a withdrawal date, but rather a “date for your success.”
Karzai then turned to one of his long-standing criticisms of U.S. and NATO military actions: high-powered ground attacks and airstrikes that cause civilian casualties.
He said he visited Wednesday with Afghans from a village in Herat province where an Aug. 22 U.S. raid killed at least several dozen civilians. One villager, Karzai said, asked how the president would feel if he had to take his wife and son and flee his home every night for fear it would be hit.
“They get their children and leave their houses and look for a safe place,” Karzai said. “Let’s imagine that we are those people, suffering from those fears. If our children are being bloodied because of the fighting, we cannot come up with words for it.”
Afghans fear the night because of bombings and house raids, the president said. He has long argued that civilian deaths anger the public and weaken support for the campaign against the Taliban.