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U.S. Upset by Karzai’s Claim About Civilian Deaths Raising Tensions, Karzai Accuses U.S. Forces of Killing Civilians in a Raid
(about 2 hours later)
KABUL, Afghanistan — American officials reacted with anger and exasperation Saturday after President Hamid Karzai, in the midst of a grand council debating a long-term security agreement, publicly accused American Special Forces troops of killing civilians in a raid on an Afghan home. KABUL, Afghanistan — For the second time in a week, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan has picked a high-profile fight with his American allies, in the midst of a grand council that he convened to support a long-term security agreement with the United States.
The question of whether to ban such home raids had been the major sticking point in the proposed agreement, which sets the conditions for American troops to remain in Afghanistan after 2014, for up to 10 more years. The issue was resolved only after President Obama sent the Afghans a letter saying such tactics would be used only as a last resort to save American lives. American officials reacted with anger and exasperation on Saturday after Mr. Karzai publicly accused American Special Forces troops of killing civilians in a raid on an Afghan home; American officials said it was an Afghan-led raid that killed only insurgents.
Mr. Karzai read that letter to the opening of a loya jirga, a council called to ratify the agreement, and recommended acceptance of the deal, while at the same time criticizing America as untrustworthy. The loya jirga is deliberating through at least Sunday. And Mr. Karzai’s aides continued to drive home the message that even if the council, or loya jirga, ratifies the Bilateral Security Agreement with the United States, Mr. Karzai will not sign it until next year, after a presidential election to choose his successor, but before he leaves office.
On Friday night a statement was posted on the president’s website saying that Mr. Karzai “condemned in the strongest terms an operation of American soldiers that killed two innocent civilians.” Quoting the governor of eastern Nangarhar Province, Mr. Karzai said that “U.S. Special Forces raided a house of twin brothers in Bati Kot District on Tuesday, martyring both the brothers.” He described the two men as a mason and a plumber. It left many people wondering why Mr. Karzai had convened a loya jirga, bringing to Kabul 2,500 Afghan notables from around the country, dismissing most employees from work for six days and locking down a capital city of five million so thoroughly that all roads to it were blocked from Wednesday through Monday.
“While condemning this operation, President Karzai said that he has been asking for a halt in such operations on Afghan houses since many years and one of the reasons to convene the loya jirga is so they could take care to decide about raids on Afghan homes and other arbitrary operations of American forces, as well as decide on the presence of their forces in Afghanistan,” the statement said. Mr. Karzai continued to insist that he would not sign, even after another long telephone call from Secretary of State John Kerry on Friday night, warning the Afghan leader that if the agreement was not signed within a month, there would be no agreement to sign.
A spokesman for the American-led International Security Assistance Forces, John D. Manley, denied that there had been any civilian casualties in the operation, which took place Tuesday, two days before the jirga began. “Afghan national security forces and a coalition adviser engaged and killed two armed insurgents after being fired upon in Bati Kot District,” he said. Mr. Karzai’s spokesman, Aimal Faizi, bluntly said Saturday that Mr. Karzai felt that Mr. Kerry, in a conversation Mr. Faizi described as “tense,” was threatening him. “When the U.S. secretary of state says if there is no agreement there will be no security, we can say there is pressure, there is threats,” Mr. Faizi said.
Coalition forces similarly denied Mr. Karzai’s assertion. American officials have insisted that without an agreement this year, they would not have time to prepare an American force for its mission after 2014, which the security agreement calls for.
“Unfortunately some people are using allegations of civilian casualties for political purposes,” an ISAF official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity as a matter of official policy. The Afghans dismiss that. “We don’t believe there’s any zero option,” Mr. Faizi said. “We believe if they have waited until now, they can wait five more months.”
“The statement goes directly to asserting this was a unilateral operation,” the official said, referring to Mr. Karzai’s statement. “There is no deadline for us,” he added. “We have said that in the past.”
“It was not,” the official said. “It was Afghan-led with 100 Afghan National Security Force personnel and 17 coalition advisers.” The official noted that Mr. Karzai had linked the operation to the loya jirga. He said Mr. Karzai believed that the Americans could not be trusted to keep their agreement, and even though both sides agreed on the security agreement’s wording, he wanted to wait until after the election next April to test further conditions: whether American forces would stop raids on Afghan homes, help promote peace talks and not interfere in the election.
American officials worried about the impact of Mr. Karzai’s remarks. Western diplomats saw that as effectively reopening talks on the security agreement, despite Mr. Karzai’s public agreement to its terms on Wednesday.
“Misleading statements like this do not help in finalizing the Bilateral Security Agreement as soon as possible this year, which is essential to the future of Afghanistan and the confidence of the Afghan people,” a United States official here said, also speaking on the condition of anonymity as a matter of policy. “He’s negotiating in public,” one diplomat said.
Afghan officials were not backing down. “On this incident, the local people’s and local officials’ accounts differ from the one the U.S. military gives,” Aimal Faizi, the spokesman for Mr. Karzai, said Saturday.This is the second controversy to arise between the Americans and Mr. Karzai since the two sides announced Wednesday that they had reached a last-minute agreement on the wording of the security accord, paving the way for it to be submitted to the loya jirga for ratification the next day. “It’s a totally different situation when the president of a country has no trust in the U.S.,” Mr. Faizi said. “That means everything, that’s a totally different way of doing things.”
During his opening speech before the council, Mr. Karzai announced that even if the members approved the agreement, he would not sign it until after the Afghan presidential election, which is now scheduled for next April. American and NATO officials have responded that the agreement must be signed this year or there will not be adequate time to plan for the American military role in Afghanistan in 2014. When Mr. Karzai first brought up the idea of delaying the signing of the accord, in his opening remarks to the jirga on Thursday, American officials hastened to find a reliable translation of what he said. Many could not believe their ears, including the American ambassador and American commander, who were in the audience.
“We’re already way behind schedule,” the senior Western official said. “The Americans have made it clear there won’t be any agreement unless it is signed this year.” The part where he said he did not trust them and they did not trust him was clear enough, but not signing what he had agreed to sign once the jirga approved it: that was puzzling. As the Americans saw it, the delay risked bringing to a crashing and unsatisfactory end an investment of half-a-trillion dollars and 2,292 American lives, along with 1,105 other coalition deaths.
On this issue, too, Afghan officials signaled that Mr. Karzai did not intend to back down. Only a week earlier, diplomats were calling Mr. Kerry “the Karzai Whisperer,” after he came to Kabul and resolved most of the deadlock over the security agreement in early October.
Mr. Faizi said that the Afghan president had spoken by telephone to Secretary of State John Kerry on Friday night about the timing of his signature on the security agreement. During what Mr. Faizi said was a long conversation, Mr. Kerry insisted on having the agreement signed before the end of the year. That term is used only ironically now. In more recent contacts, both the Americans and the Afghans have come away with sharply divergent accounts of what the two men had agreed to. According to one such account, Mr. Kerry said that President Obama would apologize for American conduct during the war, which Mr. Kerry and Mr. Obama’s aides denied had ever been discussed.
“President Karzai insisted on the Afghan stance that no more U.S. military operations” be carried out on Afghan homes, Mr. Faizi said. And Friday night, just after Mr. Karzai and Mr. Kerry ended their conversation, a statement went up on the Afghan presidency’s website quoting Mr. Karzai as accusing American Special Forces troops of killing two innocent twin brothers, a mason and a plumber, in an American raid on an Afghan home in Nangarhar Province last Tuesday, two days before the jirga started.
He said the Afghan president would explain this position in his speech on the final day of the loya jirga, now scheduled for Sunday. The American-led coalition insisted that the raid was led by Afghans, not Americans; that it killed gun-wielding insurgents, not civilian construction workers; and that complaints about the episode, delayed until the jirga was underway, were obviously politically inspired.
“There is no doubt that these are spurious civilian casualty allegations,” said a senior Western official here. “People are fairly mad at Karzai now; there’s a lot of anger and a lot of disdain.”
Throughout the negotiations over the loya jirga, coalition officials have been deliberately silent, but this time they pushed back, at least on the military side.
“Unfortunately, some people are using allegations of civilian casualties for political purposes,” an International Security Assistance Force official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity as a matter of official policy.
“The statement goes directly to asserting this was a unilateral operation,” the official said, referring to Mr. Karzai’s statement. “It was not. It was Afghan-led with 100 Afghan National Security Force personnel and 17 coalition advisers.”
A United States official here, also speaking on the condition of anonymity as a matter of policy, said: “Misleading statements like this do not help to finalize the Bilateral Security Agreement as soon as possible this year, which is essential to the future of Afghanistan and the confidence of the Afghan people.”
But Afghan officials did not back down. “On this incident, the local people’s and local officials’ accounts differ from the one the U.S. military gives,” Mr. Faizi, the spokesman for Mr. Karzai, said Saturday. He added that American officials had always been quick to deny that victims of such raids were civilians, and that an Afghan investigation by the Nangarhar governor, Mualavi Ataullah Ludin, had confirmed that the victims were civilians.
He added that this raid was another example of why the Afghans no longer trusted the Americans, because it violated the terms of an agreement signed between the countries limiting raids on Afghan homes to Afghan-led missions, initiated at Afghan request. “Here we have an example where these agreements of the past have not been respected,” Mr. Faizi said.
He said Mr. Karzai would use his speech on the final day of the loya jirga, now scheduled for Sunday, to explain his position on delaying the signing of the security agreement until the Americans meet his further requirements.
Even the organizer of the jirga, a Karzai stalwart named Sebghatullah Mujadidi, was critical. “The president is making a mistake,” he said. “He has no right to delay his signature; this is not good for the people of Afghanistan.”
It has all left even some Karzai supporters as confused as the Americans. “Why did he convene the jirga if he wasn’t willing to sign it himself?” asked Mohammad Amin Farhang, a former economics minister. “It has become his habit, that he always puts the government and the world in suspense, and says weird things at the end of his speeches, like, ‘O.K., you decide, but I won’t sign until after elections.’ ”
One Afghan delegate to the loya jirga, speaking on the condition of anonymity while the closed-door meetings were taking place, said that most of the delegates seemed to favor the agreement, and would urge the president to sign it quickly — giving him political cover to climb down from his new demands. Mr. Faizi declined to say whether Mr. Karzai would agree to that; the loya jirga is not legally binding.
“We should wait to see if that is really asked tomorrow,” Mr. Faizi said.