AFP/Vancouver Sun, Nov. 25, 2008
KABUL – President Hamid Karzai demanded at a meeting with a UN Security Council team Tuesday that the international community set a “timeline” for ending military intervention in Afghanistan, his office said.
Karzai told a delegation from the Council that his country needed to know how long the U.S.-led “war on terror” was going to be fought in Afghanistan or it would have to seek a political solution to a Taliban-led insurgency.
A U.S.-led invasion ousted the extremist Islamic Taliban regime in 2001 and launched its “war on terror,” which has brought nearly 70,000 mainly Western troops to Afghanistan, most of them under a UN Security Council mandate.
US President-elect Barack Obama has said that Afghanistan and the “war on terror” would be a priority for his government and campaigned on a pledge to shift US forces from Iraq to Afghanistan.
“The international community should give us a timeline of how long or how far the ‘war on terrorism’ will go,” Karzai’s chief spokesman Homayun Hamidzada cited the president as telling the delegation.
“If we don’t have a clear idea of how long it will be, the Afghan government has no choice but to seek political solutions,” he told AFP, adding this included “starting to talk to Taliban and those opposing the government.”