His remarks appeared to intensify the quarrel, by directly blaming Washington for what he has described as “massive fraud” aimed at weakening him and his government.
“What I said about the election was all true, I won’t repeat it, but it was all true,” Karzai told Britain’s BBC television.
“That the US carried out the fraud?” the BBC correspondent asked.
“That’s exactly what happened; I mentioned the elements who did it,” Karzai said.
He added: “We have partnership, we want to continue this alliance and partnership with the United States and the rest of the world, in the interest of both of us. But this has to be understood by all that Afghanistan is a sovereign country.”
Karzai leveled the accusations that the West was behind election fraud in a speech on Thursday, prompting the White House to demand an explanation and the US State Department to call the claims “preposterous.”
In his speech on Thursday, Karzai said foreigners had bribed and threatened election workers to carry out fraud in last year’s presidential election. He singled out the former deputy head of the UN mission in Kabul — American diplomat Peter Galbraith — as well as the French head of a European Union monitoring team.
While he did not single out the United States explicitly in his comments last week, he said: “The votes of the Afghan nation were in the control of an embassy.”
Washington has by far the largest embassy in Kabul.
The veteran Afghan leader telephoned US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Friday to smooth over the quarrel, but did not apologize for his remarks.
