By Sheryl Gay Stolberg
WASHINGTON: On the eve of his Camp David meeting with President George W. Bush, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan painted a bleak picture of life in his country, saying that the security situation had worsened and that the United States and its allies were no closer to catching Osama bin Laden than they were a few years ago.
"The security situation in Afghanistan over the past two years has definitely deteriorated," Karzai said on the CNN television program "Late Edition With Wolf Blitzer," in an interview that was taped Saturday in Kabul and broadcast Sunday while Karzai was en route to Camp David for a two-day meeting with Bush.
"The Afghan people have suffered," Karzai said. "Terrorists have killed our schoolchildren. They have burned our schools. They have killed international helpers."
As for catching bin Laden, Karzai said: "We are not closer; we are not further away from it. We are where we were a few years ago."
The White House had hoped to use the two-day meeting - Karzai's first visit to Camp David, but his seventh meeting with Bush - to showcase what Gordon Johndroe, spokesman for the National Security Council, called both the "progress and challenges" in Afghanistan.
"Afghanistan has come a long way since October 2001, when the U.S. first went in, but there is clearly more work to do," Johndroe said Sunday.
Karzai, though, spotlighted the remaining work more than the progress, in what amounted to a cry for help. He is trying to rebuild his war-torn country and strengthen his fragile government while confronting a resurgent Taliban, a booming opium trade, government corruption, mounting deaths of civilians and a Qaeda leadership that, U.S. intelligence officials say, has reconstituted itself in the mountainous border territory with Pakistan.
....