**US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said whoever wins Afghanistan’s recent election will be expected to do more to address the country’s problems.**Speaking to the BBC while in London, Mrs Clinton said the next leader needed to build better relationships with the US, the army and the Afghan people.
She said America’s goal in Afghanistan was still to defeat al-Qaeda.
But the current US review of the conflict was “leading to some welcome clarity” on the best tactics, she said.
Mrs Clinton, currently on a European tour, told the BBC’s Today programme that the US was “anxiously awaiting” the outcome of the presidential elections which were held in Afghanistan in August.
The results have been delayed over accusations of fraud and malpractice.
Incumbent Hamid Karzai leads preliminary results with about 55% of the vote, considerably ahead of his nearest rival Abdullah Abdullah, who has 28%.
‘Welcome clarity’
BBC diplomatic correspondent James Robbins said the secretary appeared unusually hesitant when asked whether the US would be proud to stand beside Mr Karzai if he emerged as the winner.
She said simply that the president had been “very helpful on many fronts”.
“We often overlook the progress made in Afghanistan, because of the serious challenges that still exist,” she said.
“But we are very clear that if this election results in him being re-elected, there must be a new relationship between him and the people of Afghanistan, between his government and governments which are supporting the efforts in Afghanistan to stabilise and secure the country.”
Mrs Clinton said the next president would also have to do more to train and deploy Afghan forces to take over from foreign troops.
“It is a more complex picture than sometimes emerges from snapshot views. But clearly we expect more, we’re going to be working towards more,” she said.
President Barack Obama is currently undertaking a review of the US military involvement in Afghanistan and the wider region, eight years after the operation first began.
The commander of US forces in Afghanistan, Gen Stanley McCrystal, has formally requested a significant increase in troop numbers.
Pakistan ‘to strike at militants’
Mr Obama is reported to have ruled out troop cuts or a major scaling back of the US effort in Afghanistan, but it remains unclear whether he will approve a significant escalation to an increasingly unpopular war.
Mrs Clinton described the review process as “a very thorough scrubbing” of US strategy which was “leading to some welcome clarity”.
She said America’s goal in the region was still “to achieve the goal of disrupting, dismantling and defeating al-Qaeda and its extremist allies” but that it was now adopting “a much more careful analysis of who actually is allied with al-Qaeda”.
“We want to be smart about how we are proceeding. The lives that our young men and women, both American and British, have put at risk - and lost - are very much in our minds. We intend to get this as right as is humanely possible.”
Mrs Clinton said many people had been paid or coerced to fight with the extremists and that developing partnerships with such people would yield results, as has been the case in Iraq.
Earlier on Sunday, Mrs Clinton said an attack by suspected Taliban militants on an army base in Pakistan was evidence of an increasing threat against the authority of the state.
Militants stormed the base in the city of Rawalpindi, taking more than 40 hostages, most of whom were freed more than 17 hours later in an army operation.
The Taliban, which officials say claimed responsibility, had been threatening to carry out attacks unless operations against them were stopped.
Pakistan’s Interior Minister Rehman Malik said a military offensive against militants in restive South Waziristan was now “imminent”.