Former president Hamid Karzai said Afghans are being used against each other by external forces and that Pakistan wants to exert strategic influence in Afghanistan through the Taliban, reports Bakhtar News on May 24. In an interview with Germany’s weekly news magazine Der Spiegel, Karzai said: “I realized early into my tenure as president that this war is not our conflict, and we Afghans are just being used against each other – the republic against the Taliban and the Taliban against us. “Both the Afghan Republic and the Taliban are victims of these external forces. That is why we are suffering,” he said.