Washington, April 4
Hitting out at his western backers for the second time in three days, President Hamid Karzai has accused the US of interfering in Afghanistan’s internal affairs and said the Taliban insurgency would become a legitimate resistance movement if the meddling doesn’t stop.

During a private meeting with about 60 or 70 Afghan lawmakers, Karzai suggested that “he himself would be compelled to join the Taliban” if Parliament didn’t back his controversial attempt to take control of the country’s electoral watchdog from the United Nations”, according to two of those who attended the meeting, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Karzai's latest remarks came less than 24 hours after he assured Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that he was committed to working with the US.

That phone call followed a similar, but less vitriolic, anti-Western diatribe that the Afghan president delivered earlier in the week, the paper said.

After Friday’s call, US and Afghan officials said they were putting the incident behind them and moving on.

Karzai's fresh round of accusations against the US and its allies laid bare his deep distrust of the West and was likely to further damage an already bruised relationship, it reported.

Five of the lawmakers who attended the two-and-a- half-hour meeting said it largely consisted of the President lambasting them for rejecting a few days earlier his attempt to take control of the country’s Electoral Complaints Commission.

“They quoted Karzai as saying that the lawmakers were being used by Western officials who want to install a puppet government in Afghanistan,” the Journal said.

Waheed Omar, a spokesman for Karzai, denied that the President said he would join the Taliban or accused the West of trying to control Afghanistan.

“He talked about the new electoral law and asked the members of Parliament to reconsider their decision,” Omar said.

The lower house of Afghanistan’s Parliament rejected almost unanimously a decree issued in February by Karzai that gave him the power to appoint all five members of the electoral commission. The upper house is yet to vote on the decree. — PTI