KANDAHAR, Afghanistan, 14 December 2006 — Afghanistan’s president yesterday accused the Pakistani government of trying to turn his countrymen into “slaves,” in his strongest words yet blaming Islamabad for a wave of violence. Hamid Karzai added that he was the only person able to prevent Afghans angered by an insurgency which has claimed nearly 4,000 lives this year from “coming after” Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf.
Pakistan hit back by saying the roots of the problem were in Afghanistan and that Islamabad was doing all it could to counter militancy, but stopped short of an outright rebuttal. “Pakistan still hasn’t given up the hope of making us slaves. But they cannot,” Karzai said in a speech at a boys’ high school in the southern city of Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taleban.
“This tyranny against our people is not by the nation of Pakistan, it is by the government of Pakistan,” he added to cheers from a crowd of around 500 students, teachers and local dignitaries. Karzai - who on Tuesday for the first time publicly accused the Pakistani government of fostering militancy in Afghanistan - linked a recent spate of suicide bombs to a visit by Pakistani Foreign Minister Khurshid Kasuri.
“Before his arrival they wanted to scare me off, they wanted me to surrender. But I’m not scared,” Karzai said. “They wanted to make me accept to become their slave. But even if they kill 25 million people (in Afghanistan) I won’t become their slave.” Pakistan fostered the Taleban movement during the 1990s, fueling suspicions among Afghan officials who have made progressively stronger comments in the past two years linking Islamabad to the bloodshed.
Karzai, who took office in late 2001 after US-led forces toppled the Taleban, said he told the Pakistani leader when he visited Kabul in September that a secure Afghanistan was in Islamabad’s interests. “I told Musharraf we are angry and the nation is angry. I told him I am the one preventing them otherwise they will come after you,” added the Afghan leader, who sheltered in Pakistan’s southwestern city of Quetta during part of the Taleban era.
The insurgents behind the violence that has made this the deadliest year in Afghanistan since 2001 were not real Afghan Taleban but “strangers ... using their beard and turban,” he said.
Karzai also sent a message to the Taleban’s fugitive leader Mullah Omar and other commanders that “if it is you operating out of a basement of Pakistan’s ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency) God may break your backbone.”
Pakistan did not directly respond to Karzai’s claims but said it was “doing whatever is needed” to counter extremism and to prevent its territory being used for militant activities in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, NATO troops killed a civilian motorcyclist who failed to stop at a checkpoint during a visit to Kandahar by Karzai, the force said yesterday. The death on Tuesday afternoon came as Karzai voiced fresh concerns over civilian deaths caused by foreign forces in the insurgency-hit country.
“A motorcyclist traveling at high speed approached an ISAF security cordon in Kandahar city. Despite verbal warnings to stop, the motorcyclist refused to halt,” the force said in a statement.
