Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Sunday rejected US criticisms of his antidrug efforts, called international help in the fight “half-hearted,” and demanded justice for prisoners abused by US troops. However, he said on the eve of a meeting with US President George W. Bush that the prisoner abuse detailed in a leaked US Army report should not reflect on the United States as a whole. The New York Times reported on Sunday that Karzai and other top Afghan officials have been unwilling to take certain steps that would curtail Afghanistan’s huge heroin trade, citing a May 13 cable from the US Embassy in Kabul.

Karzai, in an interview on CNN’s “Late Edition,” said at least 30 percent of his country’s poppies have been eradicated and called on the international community to step up its own efforts instead of blaming the Afghans. “What international money and creation of forces for the destruction of poppies was concerned, it was ineffective and delayed and half-hearted,”Karzai said. “We have done our job. Now the international community must do its job, period,” he said.

Karzai, a staunch ally in the US-led war against terrorism, said he will repeat his concern and anger over the prison abuses to the US government and wants those responsible to be held accountable in a public trial. “I will do this again. This is simply, simply not acceptable. We are angry about this. We want justice, we want the people responsible for this sort of brutal behavior punished and tried and made public,” Karzai said on CNN.

However, he added: “At the same time I must say that while we condemn this ... the behavior of one or two soldiers or interrogators must not reflect on the United States or on the US people. There are bad people everywhere.” Karzai said on Saturday he was shocked by a US Army report on abuse of detainees in Afghanistan, and that his government wanted custody of all Afghan prisoners and control over US military operations.

<B>United nations condemnation </B>

Jean Arnault, special representative of UN secretary-general Kofi Annan in Afghanistan, said on Sunday the reported abuse was unacceptable and an affront to everything the international community stood for. “The gravity of these abuses calls for the punishment of all those involved in such inexcusable crimes, as demanded by President Karzai,” Arnault said in a statement.

The abuse described in the report, including details of the deaths of two inmates at an Afghan detention center, happened in 2002 and emerged from a nearly 2,000-page file of U..Army investigators, The New York Times reported on Friday.