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Press TV has interviewed Richard Becker, with the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition in San Francisco, regarding the US drone strikes in Afghanistan.

- The Afghan president says that this is another example of US disregard for civilian life. Is he correct on that?

- I do not think there is much question about that. It seems rather amazing that there would be a strike like this at a time when, as you said in the lead, there is high level of tension in the relationship between Washington and Kabul with President Karzai over the extension of US presence in the country and at a moment like that, they have a drone strike and have another drone strike.

I think it is an indication of a desire on the part of Washington to humiliate Karzai as loyal a servant as he has been over the years, perhaps were taking a position even slightly at odds with the US position over the future of US troops but it has to be I think surprising to many people to see this kind of timing and again this another war crime really against the people of Afghanistan.

- Certainly, I would imagine that many people would not see Hamid Karzai himself as an innocent player in all of this.

- No, certainly not, I mean he has been the servant of US and I would say US imperialist interests; the US made him the president; they have supported him; they have sustained him a very corrupt regime and at the same time, the United States is seeking to gain guarantees, assurances that its soldiers and add a subject to Afghan law that old colonial practice that used to be known as extraterritoriality absolving the occupying power of having to answer to the laws of the country that they are occupying, no matter what crimes they commit.

So the fact that Karzai has been willing to go along with all of this, the US agenda for so long but it now has come to a point where the US is really talking about an open-ended occupation of Afghanistan stretching far far into the future.

- So then in a sense, has this Loya Jirga, the elder council, and Karzai’s crocodile tears, if I may call them that, has all of this been a charade in a sense?

- I think that what Karzai would like to do for the preservation not only of his own presidency but of his family’s dominant position in the political structure sounded like he wanted someone else, the subsequent president, the next president, to be the one to sign an agreement that would ratify the long-term occupation of Afghanistan by the US troops, the bases to remain there and of course this is very unpopular with the people of Afghanistan and as it will be with any people who lived under occupation for so long, who have been subject to such terrible war and deprivation.

You know, Afghanistan is last in the world in infant mortality rates absolutely last after all those hundreds of billions of dollars that US made that has been spent. So I think Karzai is trying to rescue the position of himself and the grouping around him but certainly that does not hold anything good for the Afghan people either.