Afghan President Hamid Karzai, in an interview published yesterday, urged the international community to rethink its war on global terror, saying it is overlooking the roots of the problem.
In an interview with the Financial Times newspaper, posted on its Web site (www.ft.com), Karzai said it was vital to address the root causes of terror beyond Afghanistan's borders.
"The situation has deteriorated because we have not addressed the sources of terrorism," he was quoted as saying on Wednesday in Tokyo, where he was attending a conference on disarming armed groups.
"The sources of terrorism are where they are trained, where they are financed, where they are equipped, where they are mobilized and where they are motivated," he said.
He avoided making specific criticism of Pakistan, even though his administration has complained in the past that militants have been armed and trained across the border, the Financial Times said.
But he stated that the present strategies used by the global community have been "going in circles."
Bombs ripped through two government buses in the Afghan capital on Wednesday, killing one person and wounding about 50, while a British and an Afghan soldier and nearly 40 Taliban fighters were killed in the south.
Security has been deteriorating in the vast and strategic Central Asian country despite efforts by domestic and US-led coalition forces to quell an insurgency launched by Taliban extremists.
In a different version of the interview, carried in the British print edition of the Financial Times, Karzai admitted to "some sense of dissatisfaction" that Afghan reconstruction is still a work in progress.
Disarming the militias that still hold sway in many parts of Afghanistan is one of the "foundation stones of peace and security," he said.
But he acknowledged: "I had tremendous expectations myself that we would rebuild Afghanistan in four years ... But is it possible to rebuild the whole thing in four years? No. That brings us some sense of dissatisfaction."
In the Internet version of the interview, Karzai rejected any suggestion that dissatisfaction with his own government -- criticized for crippling corruption and links with the opium trade -- was to blame.
"Why are there more soldiers killed today than in 2001, 2002, 2003? What is the cause? We must go and find the cause," he said. "Why is there an engineer killed in Afghanistan who has come to build roads for us? We have to work hard to find out why."
RSS