Afghans Seek Close US Military Tie

Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Wednesday his nation wants a long-term security relationship with the United States.

Karzai made the comment during a joint news conference with U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, but the two men sidestepped a question on whether Washington planned to maintain permanent military bases in the country.

"The Afghan people want a longer term relationship with the United States. They want this relationship to be a sustained economic and political relationship and most importantly of all, a strategic security relationship to enable Afghanistan defend itself, to continue to prosper, to stop the possibility of interferences in Afghanistan," Karzai said.

He said that America had helped bring "the sovereignty of Afghanistan back to its people."

Rumsfeld described the military-to-military relationship between Afghanistan and the United States as good, and said it had grown and strengthened, but he was noncommittal on whether Washington hoped to establish permanent military bases.

"What we generally do when we work with another country is what we have been doing. We find ways we can be helpful, it maybe training, it maybe equipment or other types of assistance. We think more in terms of what we are doing rather than the question of military bases and that type thing," he said.

Rumsfeld said the issue of the relationship between Afghanistan and United States would be something to be discussed at the level of president or the State Department.

The U.S. defense secretary was on a brief unannounced visit to Afghanistan before flying on to neighboring Pakistan.

Rumsfeld also dropped in on U.S. soldiers Wednesday in Qalat, which is in a region about 90 miles north of Kandahar and 30 miles from the Pakistan border where the Afghan government is struggling with a counter-narcotics campaign while also fighting remnants of the Taliban militia that ruled the country before U.S. forces invaded in October 2001.

Meanwhile, a senior Afghan official said the government will press on with plans to destroy opium crops across the country, after a shootout between anti-drug forces and farmers left one dead and seven injured.

President Hamid Karzai has announced a crackdown on the country's narcotics industry. Last year, 87 percent of the world's opium, the raw material for heroin, was produced in Afghanistan, sparking warnings that it is turning into a "narco-state" three years after U.S. forces ended the country's role as a base for al Qaeda.
Countries including the United States, Britain and France are training new police units to destroy crops, smash heroin laboratories and arrest smugglers, while providing hundreds of millions of dollars to help farmers switch to legal crops.

But it is expected to take years to replace the lucrative crop that has powered Afghanistan's post-Taliban revival and provided a lifeline to war-impoverished rural communities.

U.S. commanders told Rumsfeld that Taliban fighters still have some sanctuaries and support among the local population in Zabul Province along the Pakistan border, but that U.S. forces operating with newly trained Afghan troops are making steady progress in eroding that support.

The defense chief flew to Kandahar in southern Afghanistan following a one-day visit to Iraq and then traveled by helicopter to Qalat where U.S. troops are running what they call a provincial reconstruction team that provides civic aid as well as security for reconstruction projects.

Rumsfeld has not publicly discussed in detail the future U.S. role in Afghanistan, but Afghan President Hamid Karzai is known to favor arranging a long-term security relationship that could include some degree of U.S. access to air bases in this landlocked country.

Rumsfeld's visit to Qalat underscored the importance the Pentagon places on the approach of using troops to facilitate reconstruction and civil affairs work.

He shook hands and posed for photographs with a group of soldiers in Qalat and thanked them for their work before flying back to Kandahar where he spoke to several hundred soldiers and answered questions from several of them.

One soldier asked when the Army would shorten tours from 12 to six months for those serving in Afghanistan or Iraq. As he also had said a day earlier in Iraq, Rumsfeld said the Army was thinking about that, but had not made a decision.

Rumsfeld, whose itinerary was not being disclosed in advance by U.S. officials for security reasons, told the soldiers that both Afghans and Americans one day will look back on this period as a turning point in the spread of freedom. "You're earning your place in history," he said.