President Hamid Karzai's Spokesman Imal Faizi on Tuesday told reporters that several recent attacks were orchestrated by foreign intelligence services, despite being claimed as Taliban attacks. He also responded to recent reports that Karzai believes the U.S. has been behind some of the violence.
An Afghan Presidential Palace official was said to have told the Washington Post on condition of anonymity this week that President Karzai suspects the U.S. has been behind a number of insurgent-style attacks.
The Afghan President reportedly has a list of dozens of such attacks, inlcuding the recent assault on a popular Lebanese restauran in Kabul that left 21 dead, including 13 foreign civilians, and grabbed headlines around the world as one of the deadlest attacks on foreign nationals in Afghanistan since 2001.
Karzai has made a career out of lashing out at the U.S. military for causing civilian casualties. But if true, recent reports would indicate he has been planning a much larger indictement of the U.S. that implicates it in terrorist plots.
According to the Washington Post's source, Karzai believes the U.S. may be trying to destabilize his government or attempting to shift attention way from civilian casualties caused by airstrikes, which the Afghan President has denounced on multiple occassions.
The Afghan official who spoke on condition of anonymity said the sophisticated coordination and patterns of certain attacks were what initially raised red flags for Karzai.
"Some attacks launched in Kabul and other provinces have the work of foreign intelligence services behind them," Faizi said on Tuesday. "We have evidence supporting this sent by official institutions."
When responding to questions about the Washington Post report, however, Faizi said that the government had no evidence at this time indicating the U.S. was behind the attack at the Lebanese restaurant in Kabul last week.
"We do not have evidence showing whether or not it was America that attacked the Lebanese restaurant, and it was just a report published by a foreign newspaper," Faizi said. "But it is clear that some attacks are being done by foreign country's intelligence services in the name of the Taliban."
Meanwhile, the National Security Council has also said that the Lebanese restaurant attack was not a Taliban operation despite it being claimed by the group's spokesman.
The Taliban's spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid has disputed the Afghan officials' claims and maintained that all the attacks were in fact launched by insurgents.
Faizi nor anyone else form the Afghan government said explicitly what countries or groups exactly were suspected of being behind the attacks, or the nature of the evidence that had been gathered so far.
U.S. officials in Kabul have outright rejected the claims that there was any involvement in recent attacks, calling them "conspiratorial" and "divorced from reality", according to the Washington Post. The U.S. government has publically supported the Karzai government since its beginning, funneling billions of dollars into its budget over the years.
In recent months, Karzai has publically derided the U.S. for supposedly putting "all types" of pressure on Kabul to sign the still pending Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA), which would allow U.S. troops to stay in Afghanistan post-2014 and outline a continued military partnership between the two nations.
But whether or not Karzai's suspicions surrounding recent attacks are related to tensions over the BSA is uncertain.
In the past, most suspicion of foreign involvement in violence in Afghanistan was directed at Pakistan. For years, Afghan and foreign officials have bemoaned the involvement of Pakistani intelligence in nurturing insurgent groups on either side of the border.
Karzai's new allegations could be a great deal more groundbreaking. But whether or not they are true, the speculations alone confirm that relations between the U.S. and the Karzai administration have reached an all-time low.
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