KABUL‘s secretary-general Anders Fogh Rasmussen has sharply rejected President Hamid Karzai’s view that the presence of international troops caused much suffering but achieved few gains in his country.
He told a monthly press conference in Brussels on Thursday that the progress achieved in the war-torn country “thanks to the immense efforts and the solemn sacrifices” by the US and other troop contributor nations “is remarkable and it cannot be denied.”
Karzai told Britain’s BBC earlier this week NATO “caused Afghanistan a lot of suffering, a lot of loss of life, and no gains because the country is not secure.”
But Rasmussen stressed ISAF contributing nations had made an unprecedented investment to help Afghanistan build up its own security forces and to protect NATO nations from terrorism.
“Afghanistan has come a long way in the past decade,” he said, adding that “the changes have been remarkable, and our investment in lives and resources has been unprecedented. Nobody can deny that. And these efforts should be respected”
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