Speaking to Al Jazeera's Ghida Fakhry from Kabul, Abdullah Abdullah, the former foreign minister of Afghanistan, says the killing of 17 Afghan civilians in southern Afghanistan is the latest result of a series of problems facing the Central Asian nation. Though Abdullah said he could not verify reports on Monday that 15 men and two women in Helmand province were killed by Taliban fighters, he said the ongoing insecurity in Afghanistan is can be attributed to several factors. Abdullah, who challenged Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, during the controversial presidential election in 2009, says an "absence of good governance" in Kabul has led to a situation where the people of the nation do not know what the vision of the Karzai government for the country is. The former foreign minister also went on to accuse neighboring Pakistan of "continued support of the Taliban". Of the Taliban itself, Abdullah said though the door for talks between the Karzai government and the fighters should be "wide open", the group's ideology "from the beginning has been to dismantle any system" in place and instead replace it with an "Islamic Emirate". Referring to the security in Afghanistan during the Taliban, Abdullah said "that was security in a graveyard".
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