TEHRAN, May 27 (Xinhua) -- A top Iranian security official said Friday the "expansionist" U.S. policies are the main culprits for the 20-year Afghan war, the Iranian semi-official agency Nour News reported.
Ali Shamkhani, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, made the remarks in an address to the fourth Regional Security Dialogue on Afghanistan in Dushanbe, the Tajik capital.
Iran has long been hosting some five million Afghan refugees, despite the absence of efficient international support and under tough U.S. sanctions, he said.
The development and welfare of Afghan people can only be grounded on the security, peace and stability of the country, Shamkhani noted.
And since regional security is interrelated, Afghanistan's peace and stability are necessities for all regional states, he added.
To limit the U.S. continued interference in Afghanistan, "we have to work out effective solutions for Afghan people's problems, particularly the economic ones, in cooperation with each other," Shamkhani was quoted as saying.
The Iranian official urged the United States to release Afghan people's assets and compensate for the financial damages it has caused to the country.
Since the Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan in August last year, the United States has frozen more than 9 billion U.S. dollars of assets of Afghanistan's central bank, further crippling the battered economy of the war-torn country. ■
