A day after France started troops’ withdrawal from Afghanistan, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was seeking on Thursday a political exit to the 1-year war in Kabul.
A day after France started troops’ withdrawal from Afghanistan, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was seeking on Thursday a political exit to the 1-year war in Kabul.
Clinton was due in the Afghan capital for talks with the Afghan President Hamid Karzai, stepping up a diplomatic drive ahead of international conferences aimed at ending the war.
The top US diplomat was expected to meet Karzai for talks before lunch, a senior state department official told travelling media.
"She wants to signal US support for a secure and stable Afghanistan”, the senior official said.
"She will want to emphasize that the United States remains committed to Afghan reconciliation," he added
Ten years after the US-led invasion, Karzai's reconciliation efforts were derailed by the September assassination of peace broker Burhanuddin Rabbani by Taliban movement.
Rabbani headed a government council seeking a political settlement with the insurgents.
Before meeting Karzai, Clinton was to talk to civil society leaders in the capital, including Rabbani's son Salahuddin Rabbani, who now heads his father's political party, the Islamic Party of Afghanistan.
Another official said a conference of regional powers to be held in Istanbul in early November, and an international meeting of foreign ministers in Bonn, Germany, in early December, would be part of discussions.
After 10 years of military conflict in Afghanistan that has cost thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars, Washington is grappling for a negotiated exit to the war ahead of the 2012 US presidential elections.
On Wednesday, the first 200 French soldiers left Afghanistan, starting troop withdrawals announced three months ago by Paris as part of NATO plans to wind down its combat mission by 2014.
In total, a quarter of France's current troop deployment is scheduled to withdraw from Afghanistan before the end of 2012, ahead of a full drawdown of NATO's combat mission scheduled for 2014.
