Afghan President Hamid Karzai and US President George W. Bush shared the opinion that Pakistan must help quell deadly violence in Afghanistan, but broke sharply on Iranian influence there.
The two leaders, wrapping up two days of talks at the presidential retreat 112km outside Washington on Monday, said they hoped for improved cooperation between Afghanistan and Pakistan after talks in Kabul that are due to start tomorrow.
The White House warned that the two leaders had agreed that there would be no concessions to win the freedom of 21 South Korean hostages held by the Taliban Islamist militia driven from power in 2001 by US-led forces.
One day after Karzai called the Islamic republic "a helper" against extremists, Bush blasted the government in Tehran as "not a force for good" and vowed to pursue efforts to isolate Iran over its suspect nuclear program.
"We will continue to work to isolate it because they're not a force for good as far as we can see, they're a destabilizing influence wherever they are," Bush said at a joint news conference with Karzai, who did not mention Iran.
"I hope very much that this jirga [assembly] will bring to us what we need, which I think it will," said Karzai. "Our enemy is still there, defeated but still hiding in the mountains. And our duty is to complete the job."
The US president said the assembly would focus on "how we can work together -- how you can work together -- to achieve common solutions to problems. And the main problem is to fight extremism."
US officials have been increasing pressure on Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to crack down on Taliban extremists and al-Qaeda members targeting Karzai's government from bases inside Pakistan's remote tribal areas.
While the Taliban still pose a threat to Afghan civilians, Karzai insisted that the Islamic militant group has been defeated.
"They are not posing any threat to the government of Afghanistan, they are not posing any threat to the institutions of Afghanistan, or to the build-up of institutions of Afghanistan," he said.
"It's a force that's defeated; it's a force that is frustrated; it's a force that is acting in cowardice by killing children going to school," he said.
Karzai and Musharraf are due to address a meeting in Kabul tomorrow of 700 tribal elders and other influential figures from both countries to try to find ways to address the insurgency.
Bush, sidestepping a question that has been roiling the race to succeed him, declined to spell out whether he would seek Pakistan's permission to strike at extremists inside its borders if he had "actionable intelligence."
"I'm confident that with actionable intelligence we will be able to bring top al-Qaeda to justice," he said. "We're in constant communications with the Pakistan government."
Pakistan has denounced US warnings -- including from Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama, but also from top Bush aides -- of possible strikes at extremists inside its territory without permission.
Speaking on CNN on Monday, the Pakistani ambassador to the US stressed his country's commitment to going after the Taliban in the tribal areas and the need for cooperation on the issue.
"We need to sit down like grown-ups, Pakistan, the US and Afghanistan, and not blame each other," he said. "We need to ... be straight with each other. And that's how we're going to control and defeat extremism."
Bush said Karzai had "rightly expressed his concerns about civilian casualties" stemming from US or NATO strikes in Afghanistan and that he had assured his guest "we do everything that we can to protect the innocent."
"He is as much concerned as I am, as the Afghan people are. I was very happy with that conversation," said Karzai, who in the past has been sharply critical of the civilian toll from operations against the Taliban Islamist militia.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the