KABUL - Ex-president Hamid Karzai has urged the US to announce a unilateral ceasefire with the Taliban for the sake of peace in Afghanistan.
While calling for a ceasefire for the past year, the Americans were also conducting massive operations in Afghanistan, he said.
“That’s a contradiction,” the former president said an interview with the Associated Press in Kabul on Tuesday.
He asked: “You ask for a ceasefire and then you drop hundreds of bombs in a month on our country. How can that be? How can that lead us to a ceasefire?”
Karzai told the Trump administration to lead by example if it really desired peace and a ceasefire in Afghanistan.
He welcomed The Washington Post’s report regarding attempts by successive US government to mislead the Americans on the state of war in Afghanistan.
He accused the US of helping fuel corruption in the country by spending dollops of dollars in Afghanistan without accountability.
Karzai claimed the explosive report carried by the Post confirmed his complaints about US spending. Much of the money spent by the US had gone to contractors and private security firms, he explained.
“What could we do? It was US money coming here and used by them and used for means that did not help Afghanistan,” commented the former president.
With the publication of a trove of documents, Washington would begin to change its attitude toward Afghanistan, he hoped. (Pajhwok)