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Kabul: Former Afghan President Hamid Karzai said on Tuesday he took responsibility for corruption in the country while admitting that the United States was involved in it. “[I take] full responsibility for the corruption and bribes in the delivery of services … But the big contracts, big corruption, in hundreds of millions of dollars or millions of dollars, was clearly a United States of America thing,” Karzai told US-based The Washington Post.
The former president of Afghanistan has stated that talks between Afghans are for the benefit of both the Taliban and Afghan people, and there is a need for Afghans to agree on some issues and provide the ground for progress.
He said that there is a commitment on the need for inter-Afghan talks on the part of the Taliban, but no progress has been made regarding its initiation and implementation.
Hamid Karzai has criticized the freezing of Afghanistan’s foreign exchange reserves and allocating part of these reserves to the relatives of the victims and survivors of the September 11th attack by the US government.
Mr. Karzai also considers former president Ashraf Ghani’s escape from the country as the reason that government system collapsed.
Karzai was Afghanistan’s president from December 2004 to September 2014. He was the leader of the country after the US invasion to Afghanistan in 2001 following September 11 attacks on US soil.