"The United States came in the name of fighting terrorism to Afghanistan 20 years ago," he said, adding, "Did they fight it successfully? Did they fight it honestly? No. Therefore, the United States returning to Afghanistan in the name of fighting extremism, I, as an Afghan, would not welcome that."
“The Afghan forces are better prepared to shoulder the responsibilities of protecting the country on their own,” Karzai told BBC.
“The environment, the overall regional environment, and the continuation of interference and undermining of the Afghan state is continuing” he said and added, “That is something that we the Afghan people need to handle and handle sooner", TOLO news reported.
Saying that US failure to destroy safe havens for terrorists in Pakistan has created the current crisis in Afghanistan, he criticized that the US and its allies began bombing and hurting Afghan people and creating prisons in our own country.”
“That led to where we are today,” he said.
“As far as the Afghan people are concerned, they created a constitution, they went to the elections, they embraced democracy wholeheartedly, they went to school, the educated themselves, we have millions of Afghan boys and girls educated today", Karzai said adding that Afghanistan is not a failed state.
“We did all that we could to lead Afghanistan on the right track and to represent it well on the international scene,” he said.
He said that the failure of the state that one would describe, especially in the western press, is exactly where the authority and the responsibility was more with the United States and its NATO allies.
“That’s where things have failed and that’s where we the Afghan people are also being a price, a very heavy price,” Karzai added.
Karzai also said that the US general is “very wrong” about saying that there is the possibility of a civil war in the country as the international troops are leaving.
“Exactly for this reason I am telling you that that has failed. Instead of saying that they have helped Afghanistan stabilize, they leave, and the general leaving is warning of a civil war. So that means they have failed but we Afghans have not,” he added.
RHM/PR