KABUL: President Hamid Karzai said on Tuesday coordinated Taliban attacks in Kabul and three provinces had only prolonged a foreign presence in Afghanistan and he challenged the insurgents to do more for the good of the country.
The weekend attacks on the parliament and Kabul’s diplomatic quarter had caused only Afghan deaths and worked to hurt economic and security confidence, Karzai said.
Clashes raged for 18 hours before Afghan security forces backed by NATO killed the insurgents. Karzai said the violence had done nothing to win support for Taliban aims of getting foreigners and NATO-led troops to leave.
‘You did nothing for Islam, you did not work for Afghanistan’s independence and you did not work for its people, freedom and development. You worked to prolong a foreign presence,’ Karzai said in a speech commemorating almost 150 years since the birth of an Afghan reformer.
But in an effort to keep alive reconciliation efforts with the insurgents and hopes of a peace deal before most foreign combat troops leave the country in 2014, Karzai said he would not stop calling the Taliban ‘brothers’.
‘Some criticise me in the Afghan media for saying the Taliban are brothers, but I won’t give up,’ he said to enthusiastic applause.
Karzai on Monday laid most of the blame for the Taliban assault on NATO and his government’s Western backers for the failure of intelligence agents to prevent it.
Thirty-five insurgents were killed along with 11 members of the Afghan security forces and four civilians.
But NATO defended intelligence efforts and said it was not possible to block every insurgent attack in the conflict-racked country, where the war has entered its 11th year and where NATO is expected to complete its combat drawdown by the end of 2014.
‘You will never be able to, in a counterinsurgency, stop every attempt of determined insurgents to infiltrate into a city of three million,’ Brigadier General Carsten Jacobson, spokesman for NATO forces in Afghanistan, told Reuters. (UNI)
