Afghans Seek Close US Military Tie

(CBS/AP)  Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Wednesday his nation wants a long-term security relationship with the United States.

Karzai made the comment during a joint news conference with U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, but the two men sidestepped a question on whether Washington planned to maintain permanent military bases in the country.

"The Afghan people want a longer term relationship with the United States. They want this relationship to be a sustained economic and political relationship and most importantly of all, a strategic security relationship to enable Afghanistan defend itself, to continue to prosper, to stop the possibility of interferences in Afghanistan," Karzai said.

He said that America had helped bring "the sovereignty of Afghanistan back to its people."

Rumsfeld described the military-to-military relationship between Afghanistan and the United States as good, and said it had grown and strengthened, but he was noncommittal on whether Washington hoped to establish permanent military bases.

"What we generally do when we work with another country is what we have been doing. We find ways we can be helpful, it maybe training, it maybe equipment or other types of assistance. We think more in terms of what we are doing rather than the question of military bases and that type thing," he said.

Rumsfeld said the issue of the relationship between Afghanistan and United States would be something to be discussed at the level of president or the State Department.

The U.S. defense secretary was on a brief unannounced visit to Afghanistan before flying on to neighboring Pakistan.

Rumsfeld also dropped in on U.S. soldiers Wednesday in Qalat, which is in a region about 90 miles north of Kandahar and 30 miles from the Pakistan border where the Afghan government is struggling with a counter-narcotics campaign while also fighting remnants of the Taliban militia that ruled the country before U.S. forces invaded in October 2001.

Meanwhile, a senior Afghan official said the government will press on with plans to destroy opium crops across the country, after a shootout between anti-drug forces and farmers left one dead and seven injured.

President Hamid Karzai has announced a crackdown on the country's narcotics industry. Last year, 87 percent of the world's opium, the raw material for heroin, was produced in Afghanistan, sparking warnings that it is turning into a "narco-state" three years after U.S. forces ended the country's role as a base for al Qaeda.

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