KABUL/WASHINGTON (AFP) - Afghan President Hamid Karzai Tuesday accused foreign countries of plotting against his war-weary nation's peace programme, saying all negotiations should take place under his administration.Without pointing a finger at any particular country, Karzai said he had told the US government during a recent visit to Washington that "no foreign party must try to take the Afghan peace process in its hand".All negotiations with Taliban insurgents should take place through the government-appointed High Peace Council, but unnamed "foreigners" had tried to sidestep the council, Karzai said.Karzai made the comments in a long diversion during a speech to a water management conference in Kabul, but it was unclear why he raised the issue or who exactly he was targeting.A senior official told AFP that Karzai was referring "to foreign and internal elements that are trying to tell the Taliban to hold talks with other groups and encouraging political groups to hold talks with the Taliban".The plan was to weaken the Afghan government, he said, adding that the "foreign elements" were from both Western and regional countries.Afghan Defence Minister Bismillah Khan Muhammadi is on a five-day visit to Pakistan, where he has met the army chief of staff, General Ashfaq Kayani.Afghan-Pakistani relations are understood to have improved recently despite years of suspicion and mutual accusations of Taliban violence plaguing both countries."Any effort to conduct peace talks individually is not an effort for peace but it's a plot by the foreigners, aimed at weakening Afghanistan," Karzai said.Washington began tentative moves towards peace with the Taliban a year ago. But the militia broke off the talks a few months later, apparently over the failure of the United States to free Taliban prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay.Meanwhile, a US official has said that the United States and Afghanistan this week launch a third round of talks to try to reach an elusive bilateral security deal as Washington steps up its troop withdrawals."We're obviously hoping that we can make some progress following up on the meeting of the two presidents," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told journalists, adding they were trying to agree on "the legal basis for our security support after 2014.""But we've also made clear that we expect that this is going to be a negotiation that's going to go on throughout the year," she said, adding that she did not believe an agreement was imminent.After their White House talks, Obama said Nato forces would have a "very limited" role in the country after 2014, at the end of more than 13 years in the country where US-led forces toppled the Taliban leadership in 2001.But Obama warned that Karzai, with whom he has had a somewhat testy relationship, would have to accept the security agreement still under discussion granting legal immunity to US troops who remain behind. The lack of an immunity deal with the Iraqi leadership eventually killed an agreement on stationing US troops in the country after the US pullout in December 2011.For his part, Karzai has stressed that from spring this year "Afghan forces will be fully responsible for providing security and protection to the Afghan people."Karzai announced progress on another sticking point between the sides, saying the leaders had agreed to a complete return of detention centres and terror suspects to Afghan control, starting soon after he returns home.

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