Karzai says U.S. can leave . . . fight should have been in Pakistan, instead, not in Afghan villages

[bigtree]

KABUL, Afghanistan — With the United States weighing a complete withdrawal from Afghanistan at the end of next year, President Hamid Karzai offered a stinging critique of the American-led campaign here, saying coalition forces had inflicted needless suffering on Afghans.

The focus of the war, Mr. Karzai said, should have been insurgent training camps and safe havens across the border in Pakistan, not “in Afghan villages, causing harm to Afghan people.”

“If the agreement (negotiations to keep American forces in Afghanistan after 2014) doesn’t suit us, then, of course, they can leave,” he said. “The agreement has to suit Afghanistan’s interests and purposes. If it doesn’t suit us and if it doesn’t suit them, then naturally we will go separate ways.”

“The big corruption, the hundreds of millions of dollars of corruption, it was not Afghan. Now everybody knows that. It was foreign,” Mr. Karzai said.

“The contracts, the subcontracts, the blind contracts given to people, money thrown around to buy loyalties, money thrown around to buy submissiveness of Afghan government officials, to policies and designs that the Afghans would not agree to. That was the major part of corruption,” Mr. Karzai said, making an apparent reference to the Central Intelligence Agency financing a slush fund for his office with monthly deliveries of cash . . .


read: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/09/world/asia/karzai-lashes-out-at-united-states-for-its-role-in-afghanistan.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&smid=tw-nytimesworld&_r=0