KABUL: President Hamid Karzai said Wednesday Afghanistan did not want to be involved in any hostilities between the US and Iran, after a US reconnaissance drone was captured by the Islamic republic.
“The Iranians have fully understood and have cooperated with Afghanistan on the presence of the International forces in Afghanistan,” Karzai said in Kabul after a meeting with US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.
“Afghanistan should maintain and has maintained a very friendly relationship with Iran so we don't want to be involved in any adversarial relation between Iran and the US.
“Afghanistan wishes that its sovereignty and territorial integrity is not used one against the other.” The bat-winged RQ-170 Sentinel, a stealth drone designed to evade radar for surveillance flights, was on a CIA mission when it went missing, US officials, speaking anonymously, have said previously.
The episode has handed Iran a propaganda coup and Iranian state television has shown images of a robotic aircraft that experts say resembles the Sentinel.
Iran has vowed to reverse engineer the drone but has given contradictory accounts of how the aircraft went down on December 4.
Tehran initially said it shot down the drone, but later claimed the Iranian military managed to hack into the plane's flight controls.
“Those are operations that I will not discuss publicly,” Panetta said Wednesday. “Other than to say that part of our efforts to defend this country and to defend our country involves important intelligence operations which will continue to pursue.”
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