Kabul, Afghanistan — Prime Minister Hamid Karzai told U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell during a historic visit Thursday that Afghanistan needs a long-term commitment from the United States to become a normal country after years of being run by terrorists, and Powell promised that "we will be with you."
Powell told Karzai, head of the interim Afghan administration, that the United States would make a substantial financial commitment at next week's international aid donors conference in Tokyo and that U.S. forces would pursue the remnants of al-Qaida and the Taliban so they do not threaten Afghanistan's stability.
"We don't want to leave any contamination behind," Powell said of continuing military efforts in Afghanistan. "That is in the interests of the Afghan people and certainly the mission we came here to perform."
Powell's visit to Afghanistan was the first by a U.S. secretary of state since Henry Kissinger in the mid-1970s.
In Geneva, the International Committee of the Red Cross said its workers would hold private meetings with al-Qaida and Taliban prisoners flown from Afghanistan to the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The Red Cross will make public comments about conditions, but will not reveal details of individual meetings, ICRC spokesman Darcy Christen said.
Some human-rights campaigners have criticized housing the prisoners in cells open to the elements of less than 5 square meters (50 square feet) as below accepted standards.
Before leaving in the afternoon en route to India, Powell told a joint news conference that Afghan funds frozen in the United States during the years of Taliban rule would be freed in coming days and that Washington would make "a significant contribution" at the aid conference.
But U.S. President George W. Bush said Wednesday that U.S assistance would not include troops taking part in an international peacekeeping force.
Afghanistan's coffers are emptied, drained by years of warfare and looted by the fleeing Taliban as their Islamic extremist regime crumbled in November before an onslaught of American bombs supporting the rival northern alliance, which forms the core of the new government.
United Nations officials have said that Afghanistan needs millions of dollars immediately to pay the salaries of civil servants _ currently eight months in arrears _ whose efforts will be crucial to installing a stable administration and institutions.
Yet Karzai, who thanked Powell for the United States ending the occupation of Afghanistan by terrorists, emphasized that Afghanistan needs more than money.
"The Afghan people have been asking for a staying commitment, a staying partnership, from the United States to Afghanistan in order to make the region safe, in order to make Afghanistan stand back on its own feet and continue to fight against terrorism or the return of terrorism in any form to this country," Karzai said.
The Taliban provided Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida network, blamed for the Sept. 11 terror attacks on New York in Washington, with a base of operations and many of his fighters are believed to still be at large. U.S. forces have been bombing underground hideouts in recent weeks to prevent them from regrouping.
In Washington, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Wednesday that searches of more than 40 sites used by al-Qaida yielded documents, diagrams and material that showed "an appetite for weapons of mass destruction." But it did not appear al-Qaida had succeeded in making such weapons before the U.S.-led military campaign began in October.
Rumsfeld said he had been shown photographs of canisters recently found at a former al-Qaida site which could contain chemical agents.
Other officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the canisters were probably harmless. They said al-Qaida is known to have made a number of transactions in the past for useless items dressed up as chemical or other terror weapons.
A flag-draped coffin holding the remains of the last of seven Marines killed in a plane crash in Pakistan a week ago was flown Wednesday to Germany en route to Dover Air Force Base. The crash of the tanker plane was the most deadly single incident for U.S. forces in the Afghanistan campaign.
The fourth planeload of detainees in less than a week left from Kandahar on Wednesday for the high-security jail in Guantanamo. There were 30 prisoners aboard the flight, bringing the total flown out to 110 and about 320 remaining at Kandahar.
In a sign of Afghanistan's attempts to regain normalcy and establish good international relations, Karzai issued a decree Wednesday prohibiting poppy cultivation and the production and trafficking in narcotics, including opium and heroin.
Narcotics have been a major source of illicit income for Afghanistan, which produces 90 percent of the heroin used in Europe. Karzai's administration has been under pressure to launch a full-scale crackdown against the trade.
In other developments:
The U.N. refugee agency said that Pakistani authorities had let more than 600 vulnerable Afghan refugees move into a camp from a border area where many have been sleeping in the open in freezing conditions, but that some 13,000 have been refused entry.
The Yemeni Foreign Ministry said that Yemen's government had received information from a senior al-Qaida official now in U.S. custody indicating that al-Qaida was considering an attack on the U.S. Embassy there.
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