KABUL, Afghanistan, Jan 11, (AP): Vice-President Joe Biden said Tuesday that America will not cut and run in 2014, when the US-led military coalition plans to hand over control of security to Afghan forces. Speaking after a meeting with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Biden said training and aid will continue even after responsibility for security is handed over. He added that both sides share a common goal of a “stable, sovereign Afghanistan.” If “the Afghan people want it, we won’t leave in 2014,” the vice president said a day after arriving in the country for a surprise visit. Tensions have surfaced between the Obama administration and an increasingly nationalistic Karzai, whose government is plagued by charges of corruption. US officials have expressed grave concerns about how this is affecting efforts to stabilize and rebuild the country.

Just a month ago, President Barack Obama came to Afghanistan but did not meet with Karzai. The White House said that foul weather foiled plans to take Obama to the presidential palace in Kabul from the Bagram Air Field military base where he landed, and that technical difficulties prevented the two presidents from talking by secure videoconference. Although the two leaders spoke briefly by telephone, the change of plans was seen by some in Karzai’s circle as a snub. Biden’s visit could be aimed in part at smoothing things over with Karzai. A pleased-looking Karzai recalled that when Biden first traveled to Afghanistan as a senator after the US invasion “we met each other in a very cold room, with no electricity.” Now, he added, “we have electricity and good rooms in here. Afghanistan’a condition has improved and it is better now, we are very thankful for the US assistance to Afghanistan.” Just ahead of their news conference, Karzai said they had worked “on the transition,” a reference to the decision taken last November at a Nato summit in Lisbon to transfer responsibility for the security of the country to Afghan forces within four years.

Biden thanked Karzai for his efforts at the summit and said: “I think it’s gotten us on the same page.”
Biden himself tried to reassure Afghans at the news conference that it “is not our intention to govern or to nation build” and that United States had “moved into a new phase in Afghanistan which relates to the transition of security responsibility to Afghans.” Biden said he was last in Afghanistan two years ago and that much had changed since then. “We have a strategy and the resources in place to accomplish the goal of a stable and growing and independent Afghanistan able to provide for its own security,” he said. “And the process to be able at the same time, to disrupt and dismantle, defeat, eliminate al-Qaeda in Pakistan and what little appearance there is in Afghanistan.”

The US has been carrying out drone strikes against safe havens in Pakistan’s tribal belt and has tried to pressure its military to move against extremists in places like North Waziristan — a request Pakistan has so far refused. The Pakistani military has said it is too busy dealing with its own Taleban insurgents in other areas. Biden angered many Afghans last month when he said that next summer’s planned start of the withdrawal of US forces would be more than a token reduction and that the US would be out of the country by 2014 “come hell or high water.”