WASHINGTON, Feb. 26 (UPI) -- The United States remains committed to its partnership with Afghanistan and is not planning to pull out, U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Ryan Crocker said.
In an interview Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union," Crocker said violent anti-Western protests in Afghanistan over the accidental burning of Korans at Bagram Air Base are expected to taper off soon.
"I've seen this kind of thing before when I was ambassador to Pakistan," he said. "Religious sensitivities run very, very deep in this part of the world and several times while I was there we saw countrywide violence. At a certain point it tapers off and I think we're all hopeful that the appeal for calm that [Afghan] President [Hamid] Karzai made today and he did so with the backing of the entire political leadership of the country will create a condition in which this diminishes."
Karzai has said publicly and privately he recognizes the Koran burnings were an inadvertent mistake, Crocker said.
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While NATO and the United States have pulled their personnel out of the Afghan ministries in Kabul, the ambassador said the United States is not planning to leave Afghanistan.
"We remain committed to a partnership with the Afghan government and people as we seek to achieve our shared goal of disrupting, dismantling and defeating al-Qaida and strengthening the Afghan state and we're doing that so that Afghanistan can never again be the refuge for terrorists who would strike the American homeland."
Crocker said the stakes in Afghanistan remain high. "If we decide we're tired of it, al-Qaida and the Taliban certainly aren't," he said.
