Afghan President Hamid Karzai said in an interview on Saturday with The Washington Post that the US should end the increased Special Operations forces night raids that aggravate Afghans and could strengthen the Taliban insurgency.
He also said he wants US troops off the roads and out of Afghan homes and that the long-term presence of so many foreign soldiers would only make the war worse.
US commander General David Petraeus claims the 30,000 new troops have made substantial progress in beating back the insurgency.
“The time has come to reduce military operations,” Karzai said.
“The time has come to reduce the presence of, you know, boots in Afghanistan ... to reduce the intrusiveness into the daily Afghan life,” he said.
US President Barack Obama has set July next year as a target to begin drawing down US troops but US officials expect troops to be in Afghanistan for some time after that.
Karzai said his forces are ready to take more responsibility for their own security.
He also said in the interview that he was speaking out not to criticize the US but in the belief that candor could improve what he called a “grudging” relationship between the countries.
Karzai has repeatedly criticized civilian casualties caused by raids involving US and NATO troops.
Insurgents wearing suicide vests stormed a major NATO base in eastern Afghanistan on Saturday, six of them dying in a hail of gunfire before they could penetrate the defenses. Ten people died in a separate bombing in the north. The attacks — in Jalalabad in the east and Kunduz Province in the north — show that the insurgents’ fighting spirit has not been broken despite the surge of US troops and firepower.
Insurgents also set fire to a convoy of NATO fuel tankers in eastern Afghanistan yesterday, while a series of bomb blasts in the south killed a NATO service member and two civilians.
The civilians were killed in an explosion in the Spin Boldak district of Kandahar Province, just east of the Pakistan border, said district government chief Abdul Ghani. The bomb was attached to a motorcycle parked in the main market, he said. The blast injured more than 10 people.
The NATO service member was killed in a separate explosion. The international military coalition did not provide further details or the nationality of the dead service member.
The convoy attack started in the early morning when a group of gunmen rushed the trucks in the Behsud district of Nangarhar Province — the same area on the edge of Jalalabad City where a group of would-be suicide bombers tried to storm a NATO base the previous day, provincial government spokesman Ahmad Zia Abdulzai said.
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