President Bush holds up Afghanistan as a model emerging democracy, but Monday's sit-down with President Hamid Karzai comes amid deadly protests, attacks and kidnappings in a country still struggling to emerge from decades of war and repression.
Ahead of his White House meeting, Karzai said he wants greater control over American military operations in his country and punishment for any US troops who mistreat prisoners. He cited reports of prisoner abuse by American forces at the main military prison north of Kabul, the Afghan capital.
Karzai also called for an end to US raids on Afghans' homes unless the government is notified beforehand. The Defense Ministry said all arrests should now be made by Afghan authorities.
"Operations that involve going to people's homes, that involves knocking on people's doors, must stop, must not be done without the permission of the Afghan government," Karzai said.
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Following reports of Quran abuse by US forces, deadly anti-American protests across Afghanistan have killed at least 15 people and threatened a security crisis for Karzai's feeble central government.
The White House blamed a Newsweek report later retracted by the magazine for igniting the violence.
The May 9 story said Pentagon investigators had found evidence that interrogators at the US Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, placed copies of the Quran, the Muslim holy book, in washrooms to unsettle suspects and flushed one down a toilet.
Karzai began his four-day US visit on Sunday by sharply denying a reported State Department cable that said he has not worked strongly enough to curtail production of opium, the raw material for heroin.
"A diplomatic cable sent May 13 from the US Embassy in Kabul and addressed to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said a US-sponsored crackdown on the world's largest narcotics industry had not been very effective, in part because Karzai "has been unwilling to assert strong leadership," The New York Times reported Sunday.
Taking issue, Karzai said, "Instead of blaming Afghanistan, the international community must now come and fulfill its own objective to the Afghan people, and they must not spend money on projects that they cannot deliver properly in Afghanistan, and on creation of forces that are not effective."
The New York Times yesterday detailed fresh allegations of mistreatment of prisoners by US forces, citing the Army's criminal investigation into the deaths of two Afghans at the Bagram base north of the capital Kabul in December 2002.
In Texas, US soldier Spc. Brian E. Commack was sentenced in a court-martial on Friday to three months in prison after pleading guilty to the 2002 attack on prisoner Mullah Habibullah in Afghanistan. Cammack, a member of the Army Reserve's 377th Military Police Company in Cincinnati, said he was angry when he struck the prisoner twice in the thigh with his knee. The prisoner allegedly had spat on his chest.
Karzai -- often viewed by critics as an American puppet -- insisted that abusers be punished.
"This is simply not acceptable," he told CNN. "We are angry about this. We want justice. We want the people responsible for this sort of brutal behavior punished and tried and made public."
The US military has said it would not tolerate any abuse.
The United Nations also entered the prisoner abuse controversy yesterday.
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Richard Provencher, UN spokesman in Afghanistan, said all Afghan detainees should be treated in accordance with international law and called for "firm guarantees" that there would be no more maltreatment.
"Such abuses are utterly unacceptable and an affront to everything the international community stands for," he said.
Karzai's four-day US visit includes meetings with Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, congressional lawmakers and the new head of the World Bank, Paul Wolfowitz. Karzai received an honorary degree Sunday from Boston University and will pick up another at the University of Nebraska-Omaha.
