AGENCIES

KABUL IN a recent interview with the Time Magazine World, Afghan President Hamid Karzai has said that US could have done better in Afghanistan if it respected the homes of Afghans and fought terrorism elsewhere.

“In its time here the United States could have done a lot better for Afghanistan,” President Karzai said. “But then they did not regard the homes of Afghan villagers as homes that gave the United States and Nato a welcome.” “And in the name in the war on terror, which everybody knew was to be fought elsewhere; too many innocent Afghans lost their lives. Too many were wounded, too many homes were violated,” Karzai is quoted as saying.

But the Afghan President has also thanked the US and Nato for bringing better education, healthcare, economic growth and somehow stability in Afghanistan, while he has criticised them for not bringing security.

“It did not bring the defeat of terrorism, as we thought it would. It did not fight the war in terrorism in a manner that we felt was right.

Karzai told the Time in an exclusive interview.

The US has spent more than half a trillion dollars on the Afghan campaign in the past decade and lost around 2,000 of its troops in the Afghan war.

About the relations between Afghanistan and the US, President Karzai has vowed he’s pro-US but stressed on protecting Afghans and their homes.

He has emphasised that his criticism was not about the US government but about the strategy used in Afghanistan.

“We are not anti- American,” he has told the magazine. “We are rather pro-American. But I have to protect Afghan homes. The US media understood it as Afghan belligerence, or opposition to the US. It was opposition to a method applied to Afghanistan.”