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Press TV has conducted an interview with Gareth Porter, investigative journalist, about President Hamid Karzai condemning the NATO forces for causing "a lot of suffering" to the people of Afghanistan and failing to bring stability to the war-torn country.

- How accurate do you think Karzai is when he says that the US-led forces have caused “a lot of suffering” in Afghanistan with no gains?

- Well, of course the idea that Karzai is communicating there is well-known to the Afghan population that the US presence in particular has been the cause of a great deal of civilian suffering including many many thousands of losses of civilian lives. 

And perhaps more than anything else, Karzai is extremely sensitive to the fact that a very large proportion of those deaths of civilians have been caused by the so-called night raids which are in fact at the center of the continuing conflict between Karzai and the United States.

So I think that that's really what this story is revolving about more than anything else.

- Right, but now looking beyond 2014, the US wants to continue to stay within Afghanistan for at least another ten years. How does the US measure success on the ground in Afghanistan if it wants to stay for this long?

- Well that is a bit of a mystery how the United States measures success in Afghanistan. There was a time when the Pentagon used to issue periodic reports that allowed one to analyze the statistics that they were putting forward.

That time has long passed and so I think the way in which or the ways in which the Pentagon now tries to assess the state of success in the war is much more mysterious than ever before and one has to believe that more and more as time passes, the question marks become more numerous about whether this is really a success story or not, even within the Pentagon itself.

- And also very quickly if you can, the allies are on the security pact now to see whether it comes through or not, Karzai is under a lot of pressure and you did mention that there are a lot of sticking points right now between Kabul and Washington, but do you see this going through?

- I think there is a very serious question about that now. Karzai is of course threatened not to go ahead with the signing of this precisely because of the US demands to carry out unilateral night raids in the future and the Afghan government under Karzai basically refusing to go along with that.

That has been a sticking point for many, many months and some people may recall that there was a memorandum of understanding in the spring of 2012 but that understanding allowed the United States although in a rather encoded fashion hidden within the agreement to carry out unilateral raids, night raids whenever it wanted.

But that was an MOU not with the central government itself, not with the president but with the Ministry of Defense. And I think that was because Karzai himself was still holding out.

And so, you know I think what we are looking for, we are looking toward now is a repetition of what happened with the US relationship with the government in Iraq which was that the government of Iraq finally refused to sign an agreement with United States allowing the US to station troops there for the foreseeable future.

I think this may well arise again in the case of Afghanistan.