“They are there like we were there in the past. I had also stayed in Pakistan then,” Mr Karzai said during a 80-minute wide-ranging press talk he had here on Sunday with a group of senior journalists from Pakistan.
The president was candid and forthcoming throughout the press talk and presented his case without mincing words but taking great care not to kick up new controversies.
He said he would be lying if he were to say that they (Taliban leaders) were not staying in Pakistan.
But he said this did not mean that he was accusing Pakistan government. “We are simply complaining like a brother complains to another brother. There is no hostility. There is no ill feeling. It is for the purpose of reminding, if you do not know then that is what is going on, let us fix it.”
He said when he told a foreign media person recently about Mulla Omar being in Quetta he was not making a statement of fact but only quoting a report “which we cannot confirm but which said that Mulla Omar was seen near Saleem Complex in Quetta.”
He insisted that he was not making any allegations against the government of Pakistan. “This is not something for which we hold the government of Pakistan responsible.”
“We are looking for resolution. Not to hurt the feelings. I consider you to be as much affected by terrorism as I consider myself. Would you want people in Quetta to be killed by sectarian violence? Bombs to explode in your cities? It is for your own good as much as it is for our own to mutually eradicate terrorism,” said president Karzai with feeling.
He said when Pakistan responds to such complaints from Afghanistan in a political manner, Afghanistan gets hurt. “We are taken aback. We get hurt. We are not as sophisticated as you are. We do not make these complaints to hurt but to resolve the problem.”
The Afghan president said that neither Pakistan nor India can use Afghanistan against each other. “With Pakistan we have traditional relations, family relations, trade relations and cultural relations, so on and so forth, but with India we have country-to-country relations which is different from the kind of relations we have with Pakistan.”
He said after having helped Afghanistan so much over the past 20 years, Pakistan today was agonising for its lack of influence in Kabul. “If this is so, then how could India, to whom we are not as much obliged as we are to Pakistan, could influence us?”
He said Afghan people have learnt how to protect and promote their interest, “and it is in our interest to see India and Pakistan develop normal relations. And we do not want to get ourselves involved in their fight. In our own interest we are extremely aware of the importance of our relations with Pakistan.”
He said he had made it very clear to his Indian friends that Afghanistan’s relations with India would remain just that and they would not be affected or be allowed to be affected by Pakistan’s relations with either Kabul or New Delhi, “and the same applies to Pakistan.”
When asked if his perceptions about the importance of friendship with Pakistan was shared by his cabinet members, president Karzai said the people who had belonged to the former United Front, understood very well the necessity of having good neighbourly relations with Pakistan.
“When we were inviting dignitaries from all over the world to attend the first inaugural day of the interim government we discussed in the cabinet the desirability of inviting your former foreign minister Abdus Sattar and everybody said he was welcome here and from that day to this, there has been a lot of change in the mind-set of the government. But common people want more from government of Pakistan for building peace,” he added.
He said politically his government had passed through various stages of legitimacy and had acquired a level of political authority over the entire country but administratively “it has not been able to reach the villages and districts.”
“We do not have trained civil servants or police so we have not been able to provide the needed services to various parts of the country. But things have started improving,” he said.
This state of administrative weakness, he said, had led many in the West and even in Pakistan to conclude that his government’s writ does not go beyond Kabul.
He did not attribute motives to those who hold this perception.
Answering a question on Durand Line, the Afghan president said that this matter had not been discussed, nor talked within his government. “No new discussions have taken place yet.”
He also denied that there were plans to build a dam over river Kabul.
“There is no water in Kabul river. Give us water we will build a dam.”
He said Afghanistan will have democracy. “Afghans are by nature democratic. They are jirga oriented, meeting oriented, council oriented.
This is natural environment for democracy. And another reason why democracy has a future in Afghanistan is that we do not have a strong army.”
In his opening remarks the Afghan president put a lot of emphasis on developing people-to-people relations between the two countries rather than government-to-government relations.
“I am not a pro-government man myself. Our societies would do much better without governments. Don’t call me an anarchist. It is just an opinion.”
He said he wanted to see the per capita income of the people of the two countries go up to $5000-6000 and the trade between Afghanistan, Pakistan and beyond Central Asia to grow to $4-6 billion dollars annually in due course.
He said already about 30,000 Pakistanis including 10,000 carpenters were working in Afghanistan and most of the printing presses in Afghanistan are from Pakistan.
He said he was a apolitical man and when he sits down to talk with president Musharraf or prime minister Jamali (by the way your prime minister is coming to Afghanistan this month), “I really don’t like to talk politics. I like to talk about families, about each other’s life, better life for both the countries.”
He said Afghan people had very sweet and profound memories of their stay in Pakistan as refugees and in future, they would like to join hands with the people of Pakistan to better the lot of the people of the two countries, “a future based on business, trade, hard work and happiness.”