Afghan President Hamid Karzai held talks with US regional envoy, Marc Grossman, in Kabul just days after President Barack Obama warned Pakistan there were “some connections” between its intelligence services and extremists.
“The Afghan president asked Grossman to put more pressure on Pakistan so that future meetings with them should bring a positive result,” one official at the presidential palace told AFP.
Relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan, long mired in distrust, have recently deteriorated with Kabul alleging that the murder of its peace envoy Burhanuddin Rabbani was hatched in Pakistan and carried out by a Pakistani.
Kabul accused Islamabad of hindering the investigation and also claimed to have foiled an alleged plot in Pakistan to assassinate Karzai.
The palace quoted Grossman as promising that the United States will “continue putting pressure on Pakistan to take practical steps forward.”
Karzai said further meetings with Pakistan “should bring positive results, because after all these suicide attacks and terrorism the people of Afghanistan are losing their patience,” added the statement.
US Embassy spokesman Gavin Sundwall told AFP that Grossman was on a tour of the region to discuss preparations for international conferences on Afghanistan’s future in Istanbul and Bonn later this year.
“That’s what he met President Karzai about this morning,” Sundwall said.
Washington has stepped up calls on Islamabad in recent weeks to break ties with the Al-Qaeda linked Haqqani network, blamed for last month’s 19-hour siege on the US embassy in Kabul.
On Thursday, Obama accused Pakistan of “hedging its bets” in “having interactions with some of the unsavory characters who they think might end up regaining power in Afghanistan” after US-led foreign troops leave.
“And there is no doubt that there’s some connections the Pakistani military and intelligence services have with certain individuals that we find troubling,” he added. Islamabad denies links between the Haqqanis and its intelligence services.
Meanwhile, the Afghan president’s office says a man accused of plotting to kill Karzai was not one of his personal bodyguards, as intelligence officials had initially said.
Karzai’s office said Saturday the suspect was a member of the palace protection unit but that he was assigned to an outer gate of the presidential complex and had no access to the heavily secured palace. fghan intelligence officials announced Wednesday that they had broken up a cell that was planning to assassinate Karzai.
They had said that a palace bodyguard from Karzai’s hometown of Karz was among six people they arrested.
The others included a Kabul University professor and three college students. The officials said all had ties to militant groups.
