KABUL, Oct 13: US Secretary of State John Kerry and Afghan President Hamid Karzai yesterday reached a preliminary agreement on a bilateral security pact that now depends on approval by Afghanistan’s tribal leaders.
The pact, announced jointly by Kerry and Karzai after two days of talks in the capital, Kabul, would keep some US forces in Afghanistan after 2014.
It includes a key US demand to retain legal jurisdiction over the troops that will remain in Afghanistan, which would give them immunity from Afghan law.
It will be up to the country’s Loya Jirga, an assembly of elders, leaders and other influential people, to decide whether to accept it.
“Tonight we reached some sort of agreements,” Karzai told a news conference, speaking through an interpreter.
US officials said they wanted the pact finalised by the end of October and Kerry’s visit was seen as a last-ditch effort to push the deal through before the deadline.
The United States is insisting it cannot agree to a deal unless it is granted the right to try US citizens who break the law in Afghanistan at home in the United States.
A senior US administration official said the sides had agreed on language in the draft deal that covers the issue of immunity and “that can be put to his Loya Jirga for their consideration.”
“We need to say that if the issue of jurisdiction cannot be resolved, then unfortunately there cannot be a bilateral security agreement,” Kerry told a news conference.
Karzai said the talks had focused on protecting Afghan sovereignty and that major differences had been resolved, including a US request to run independent counter-terrorism missions on Afghan territory.
Such operations carried out by the United States have long infuriated the Afghan president, who had been demanding Washington agree to share intelligence instead.
Karzai said the US snatching of a senior Pakistani Taliban commander was an example of the kind of action that Afghanistan wanted to avoid.
“This is an issue that we have raised in earnest with the United States in the past few days as we have all previous occasions of such arrests in which the Afghan laws were disregarded,” Karzai said, referring to the capture of commander Latif Mehsud.
“Therefore our discussion today in particular has been focused on making sure that through the bilateral security agreement such violations are not repeated.”
Kerry attributed the complaint to a misunderstanding.
“We followed the normal procedures that the United States follows … We did what we are supposed to do,” he said. (AGENCIES)
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