Kabul, December 04: Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai says the British prime minister’s remarks on his country were “extremely insulting.”
Premier Gordon Brown’s remarks were “very unfortunate and very artificial. It is extremely insulting,” Karzai said in an interview with the Associate Press on Thursday.
Earlier in the week, speaking at a Commonwealth summit in Trinidad and Tobago, Brown had said that during a January 28 conference in London certain goals would be set for Afghanistan.
A clear timetable and plan for training Afghan security forces and battling police corruption were among the goals Brown said should be met.
“Within nine months, President Karzai should have completed the process of appointing 400 provincial and district governors,” Brown had said.
The Afghan president, however, added that mentioning such remarks “doesn’t affect me and it doesn’t affect the Afghan people.”
The interview comes after Brown pledged 500; US President Barack Obama vowed 30,000; and their NATO allies committed 5,000 more troops to the almost nine-year-old war in Afghanistan.
Although nearly 110,000 foreign troops are currently fighting the militants in Afghanistan, they have yet to establish stability in the country.
—–Agencies