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U.S.-led
war in Afghanistan has to be stopped: Former king.
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ROME,
March 7 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) – U.S.-led war in Afghanistan
came under attack from different parties and for various reasons Thursday.
The exiled king of Afghanistan denounced the campaign as "stupid and
useless", as questions were raised in Germany about the role of its
soldiers in Afghanistan after two of them died and others were injured.
Mohammed
Zahir Shah, exiled in Rome and due to return in two weeks, was interviewed
by the Italian daily newspaper, La Stampa, published Thursday. He is to
attend a meeting of tribal elders to decide the future of the war-torn
nation. In the interview, he said the campaign should be called off.
"It
is a stupid and useless war and it would be better to stop it
immediately," the 87-year-old king said. "My people have always
fought for freedom and democracy,” he added, reported Agence France-Presse
(AFP).
Zahir
Shah is in conflict with interim Afghan leader Hamid Karzai, who wants the
so-called anti-terror offensive to continue.
Karzai
told the U.S. government on Tuesday that he wanted the operation to last as
long as necessary. "We are not going to be seen to be impatient,"
Karzai said.
Zahir
Shah is due to return to Afghanistan in the next few days in time for the
Nowrooz celebrations on March 21 which mark the beginning of the Afghan new
year.
Meanwhile,
the deaths of two German soldiers in Afghanistan has come as a sharp shock
to Germany - a country still relatively new to international troop
deployment.
Three
Danish and two German soldiers died and eight others were injured while
destroying two Russian-made SA-3 ground-to-air missiles at a munitions dump
in the capital, Kabul.
Press
comments after Wednesday's incident called for a more transparent policy by
the German government - one which did not underplay the dangers of the
soldiers' role or disguise what they were doing in Afghanistan.
"News
of the (Kabul) deaths hit an unprepared public opinion," the
Frankfurter Allegemeine Zeitung noted.
"One
had only just learned - by roundabout means - that German soldiers were not
simply on police patrol in Afghanistan but engaged in the combat zones
too," the German daily newspaper said pointedly.
"Now
it proves that service in Kabul is also more dangerous than one could have
imagined," another paper, FAZ said.
The
paper added, "If the broad public support for the Afghanistan
engagement turns into its opposite, that would not least be the result of an
erroneous information policy aimed at closing the eyes of public opinion to
reality."
Die
Welt, in an editorial entitled "The seriousness of the situation",
said: "Now at last, everybody must be conscious of the high risk of the
Bundeswehr's engagement in Afghanistan".
Withdrawal
of the troops would give "a wrong signal", it said.
"But
the politicians must finally and clearly inform the public about what the
Bundeswehr should be doing in Afghanistan and what it in fact can do,"
The Welt said.
The
Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper used the occasion to express irritation
about the lack of information on what the German military were doing in
Afghanistan.
It
warned that the government was on "a dangerously short road" to a
situation where Germany's engagement in the fight against terrorism escaped
parliamentary control.
"It
is precisely for that reason that the Defense Ministry's information policy
is unsatisfactory. It is annoying... It is beginning to become dangerous for
a red-green coalition already on shaky ground in security matters.
"A
government that thinks it can hush up a growing political debate is
naive," The Rundschau concluded.
