WASHINGTON: As a war with Iraq looms, Afghan President Hamid Karzai spent the last two days in Washington trying to drum up attention for his country, fearing it may be forgotten as the United States prepares to take the so-called war on terrorism to Iraq.

In addition to meeting with US President George W. Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Thursday, Karzai went before Congress a day earlier to tell senators: “Don’t forget us if Iraq happens”.

Since a US-led coalition ousted the Taliban regime in 2001 in the first phase of the ‘war on terrorism’, Afghanistan has slowly faded from the US radar screen. Newspapers no longer carry Afghanistan stories on the front page, and broadcast media remains fixated on the international effort to disarm Iraq.

Bush and his deputies maintain they are committed to seeing through the effort to stabilize Afghanistan and bring prosperity to its people, and have pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to pay for schools, medical care, infrastructure and build a national army.

But Karzai worries less attention on Afghanistan will weaken the country and return it to the breeding ground of the 1990s that became the staging ground for the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States.

“If you reduce the attention because of Iraq to Afghanistan, and if you leave the whole thing to us to fight again, it will be repeating the mistakes that the United States made during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan,” Karzai told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.—dpa