Karzai talks smack against the United States as he refuses to sign a bilateral security agreement while insisting the U.S. enter talks with the Taliban terrorist organization?
During a Pentagon press conference on Feburary 7, 2014 Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel made the following comments about Afghanistan and the bilateral security agreement President Karzai is still refuses to sign at this point:
“On Afghanistan, as you noted, we met with the president this week, a very good first assessment the president received on where we are, on retrograde and all the other dimensions of what’s going on in Afghanistan. It was an honest exchange between his commanders and himself about the future.
You know our position has not changed, in that we have continued to encourage President Karzai to sign the BSA [bilateral security agreement], incidentally, a document that he negotiated in its finality and agreed to, a document that was overwhelmingly supported by the loya jirga that he brought together, a document, as far as we can tell, from every measurement of the people of Afghanistan, is supported by the people of Afghanistan.
So we continue to hope and believe that that will be signed. We will continue to plan and work with our NATO and ISAF commanders for a post-2014 mission. You know that we’ve identified that as train, assist, advise, and counterterrorism. I’ll be going to Brussels, as you all know, in two or three weeks, which obviously this will be on the agenda”, said Hagel (source: DODhttp://www.defense.gov/Transcripts/Transcript.aspx?TranscriptID=5368).
See related article: Afghanistan’s Karzai in secret talks with Talibanhttp://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/04/us-afghanistan-karzai-idUSBREA130E620140204
See also article: Taliban talks: What is Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai really up to? http://rt.com/op-edge/taliban-afghanistan-us-846/