Afghan lawmakers Wednesday criticised presidential spokesman Aimal Faizi for calling the Nato mission in Afghanistan "illogical and aimless", warning that such comments threaten the stability of the country.
The lawmakers said that the views coming from President Hamid Karzai's representative should be clarified as a personal idea of Karzai and not the views of the Afghan people.
"Such speeches will cause chaos in the country," MP Mohammad Naeem Lalai Ahmadzai said in Wednesday's parliamentary session. "The president is trying to remain in power by such statements. It is his personal idea, not the people's."
Fatima Aziz, an MP from northern Kunduz province, suggested the statement was too late considering Nato had been in Afghanistan more than a decade.
"Why didn't the government say ten years ago that the Nato mission is illogical and aimless? The Nato mission was not a secret," she said. "The comment will damage Afghanistan."
Lawmakers said they believed that Afghanistan needed the cooperation of the US and the presence of the foreign forces.
"Afghanistan's war is being planned by neighboring countries especially in Pakistan. And the country [Afghanistan] has serious need for international cooperation and the presence of foreign forces because the war has not ended in the country," member of the parliamentary international committee Noor Akbari said.
MPs said that main cause of war in Afghanistan is the intervention of the regional countries especially Pakistan where insurgents are being funded and equipped to be insurgents, creating more security challenges and thereby the need for foreign forces to assist until the Afghan forces can defend the country.
Faizi said Tuesday that the Nato-led military operation was "illogical and aimless", the latest public criticism of the foreign forces after Karzai's recent broadsides against the US.
His statement came after Nato chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen rejected Karzai's recent allegations of US collusion with the Taliban.
"The people of Afghanistan ask Nato to define the purpose and aim of the so-called war on terror.... (They) consider this war as aimless and illogical to continue," Faizi said.