Washington — Afghan leader Hamid Karzai said Tuesday democracy will thrive in his country and elections will be in two years. He promised his interim government will never abandon the war against terrorism.
"We are committed to the democratic process in Afghanistan," Karzai said in a speech at the National Press Club after spending the morning on Capitol Hill. "We are committed to letting the Afghan people determine their own future."
He said the political process that started in December in Bonn, Germany, when he was chosen to lead the interim government, would continue.
Karzai said his government would not interfere with the work of a commission that will choose members of a grand national assembly. It will meet in May to create an administration that will serve for two years while a constitution is drafted.
He is said to favor establishment of a strong central government in Kabul like the one that existed before 1973 when the monarch, King Zaher Shah, was overthrown.
Intervening in a U.S. policy debate, Karzai said Taliban and al-Qaida prisoners at the U.S. Naval base in Guantanamo, Cuba, are criminals, not prisoners of war.
"They brutalized Afghanistan," he said. "They killed our people. They destroyed our land. There was no war there. It was plain killing fields, and these people were perpetrators of that atrocity."
Speaking to senators earlier, he said his government would remain committed to the war against terrorism.
"We will continue our war against terrorism to the absolute end of it."
Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said "there is genuine, genuine, genuine support" in Congress for standing behind the reconstruction of a stable Afghanistan.
The official activities of Karzai's two-day visit ended Tuesday night with his attendance at President Bush's State of the Union address.
Karzai, who leads an interim government that will serve until June, was well-received Tuesday on Capitol Hill, given his role as an ally in the U.S. campaign against the Taliban and the al-Qaida terrorist group.
He indicated no concern over Bush's insistence that the United States stay out of the multinational peacekeeping force in his country.
"What is important for us is that we have from President Bush the assurance that America will stay in Afghanistan bilaterally, and will help with the training of the national Afghan army. That's good news," Karzai said.
A week earlier, the administration pledged $296 million at an international conference in Japan to raise money for Afghan reconstruction.
Bush also promised U.S. help in the development of an Afghan national military.
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