Afghanistan Parliament approves US strategic pact

KABUL: Afghanistan’s Parliament yesterday voted by an overwhelming majority to ratify a strategic partnership agreement with the United States signed earlier this month, lawmakers said.
“We voted with a majority in favor of the strategic pact,” MP Shukria Essakhil said.
“Only five MPs voted against it,” she said, adding that around 190 lawmakers out of 249 were present for the open vote.
Earlier this month, President Barack Obama paid a surprise visit to Kabul to sign a deal with his Afghan counterpart Hamid Karzai that will cement post-war ties with Kabul after 2014, when NATO-led combat forces leave Afghanistan.
The pact foresees the possibility of American forces staying behind to train Afghan soldiers and pursue the remnants of Al-Qaeda but does not commit Washington to specific troop or funding levels.
The pact alarmed Afghanistan’s neighbors including Iran, and lawmaker Bakhtash Seyawash said that the Islamic republic had attempted to “sabotage” the vote.
“There is no doubt that Iran tried to influence the vote, but it didn’t work,” he said.
“There were accusations that Iran has tried to pay millions of dollars to MPs, that is why the Parliament decided to hold an open vote,” he added.
“Iran’s efforts to sabotage the vote failed,” he said.
Relations between Afghanistan and Iran have been strained by the strategic pact, officials said, charging that Tehran had harassed Afghan diplomats in recent weeks.
Lawmakers had warned Iran to end its “interference” in Afghanistan’s internal affairs over the pact.
On Friday, Afghan President Hamid Karzai said that the agreement was not against the national interest of any neighboring countries.
“Any pact we sign is not against Iran and it’s for the stability of Afghanistan and expanding relations with” its neighbors, Karzai said. The deal, reached after months of painstaking negotiations, also states that the United States does not seek permanent military bases in Afghanistan.
There are currently around 130,000 international troops in Afghanistan and all NATO-led combat forces are due to leave by the end of 2014.
But amid a rising death toll, troubled domestic economies and the increasing unpopularity of the Afghan war in many Western countries, troop withdrawals are now getting under way.
Death toll hits 50
Meanwhile the death toll from flash floods in a northern Afghan province has hit 50 — most of them women and children — an official said on Saturday, a week after the disaster struck. The floods that inundated Sari Pul province were triggered by torrential rain and have left thousands of people homeless, provincial governor Abdul Jabar Haqbeen said.
“The floods have killed 50 people so far, mostly women and children,” he said.
“Around 59,000 people have been displaced, and dozens are still missing,” he said, Rescue teams have launched an operation to find the missing people, he said. Afghanistan’s harshest winter in 15 years saw unusually heavy snowfalls and experts predicted that rivers swollen by melting snow were likely to flood in the mountainous north in spring.