Afghan policemen stand guard at the site of a suicide attack that wounded Afghanistan's Intelligence Chief Asadullah
Afghan President Hamid Karzai blamed the U.S. and NATO forces on Thursday for some of the violence in his war-torn country and bluntly criticized allied tactics, declaring that terrorists won't be beaten "by attacking Afghan villages and Afghan homes."
Speaking in an exclusive interview with NBC News, Karzai also said he had written a letter to President Barack Obama warning that Afghans will not permit American and NATO troops to stay past 2014 unless the U.S. turns over hundreds of detainees held at Bagram Air Base and a nearby facility.
"I have written to President Obama that the Afghan people will not allow its government to enter into a security agreement while the United States continues to violate Afghan sovereignty," he said. "Part of the insecurity is coming to us from the structures that NATO and America created in Afghanistan."
NATO-led forces are currently scheduled to withdraw by the end of 2014, but the Obama Administration has entered into negotiations with the government in Kabul on a security pact that would allow some as-yet undisclosed number of troops to remain beyond that point. Their mission would be to train Afghan security forces and carry out counter-terrorism missions. White House press secretary Jay Carney recently said that Obama has not yet settled on the size of that residual force. The spokesman also suggested that no troops might remain.
White House officials did not immediately return requests for comment.Obama made the American withdrawal from Iraq and planned withdrawal from Afghanistan key planks of his reelection platform. But the pull-out from Iraq came about in part because of the collapse of negotiations over maintaining an American presence there. The Iraqi government refused to give U.S. forces immunity from prosecutiona deal-breaker for Washington. Karzai's comments raise the specter of another possible deal-breaker.
Karzai has regularly denounced NATO night raids and strikes that have killed civilians in Afghanistan. But he also aims to secure billions of dollars in long-term aid for his country's military and economy. (At a farewell press conference with then-President George W. Bush in December 2008, Karzai said: "Afghanistan will not allow the international community leave it before we are fully on our feet, before we are strong enough to defend our country, before we are powerful enough to have a good economy, and before we have taken from President Bush and the next administration billions and billions of more dollarsno way that [we] can let you go.")
More than 3,000 American and allied military personnel have been killed in the decade-long conflict launched to catch or kill Osama bin Laden, who Navy SEALS shot dead in a dramatic May 2011 raid inside Pakistan.
