and DAVID STRINGER
Associated Press
LONDON — Afghanistan’s president promised Wednesday to lift the defense burden from the U.S. and its allies, as senior officials gathered in London for a conference to bolster flagging support for the international mission there.
President Hamid Karzai said Afghanistan “wants to soon be defending its own territory, its own people, with Afghan means.” But he cautioned the country would need prolonged “sustained support” from the international community.
“Afghanistan does not want to be a burden on the shoulder of our allies and friends,” Karzai said after meeting German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin ahead of today’s conference in London.
The conference has been called in hope of offering Western countries a way out of Afghanistan, where U.S. and NATO forces have been taking increasing casualties from a resurgent Taliban, and where officials concede total military victory is impossible.
The U.S. and its NATO partners are trying to shift more of the combat burden on the Afghans by accelerating the training of the Afghan army and the paramilitary national police. Last month Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Sen. Carl Levin complained that the U.S. strategy called for more American troops but “with too few Afghan partners alongside them.”
The centerpiece of the conference is a $500 million plan to lure Taliban fighters away from the insurgency with jobs and economic incentives.
Karzai has said he’s willing to talk to Taliban leaders — including the top commander Mullah Mohammed Omar — if they are willing to renounce violence.
Besides reconciliation, the conference will grapple with reconstruction, fighting corruption and drug trafficking and a province-by-province handover of security control from U.S. and NATO troops to Afghan forces beginning as soon as next year.
