Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai after his meeting with President George W. Bush here softened his rhetoric on the question of prisoner abuse as well as the control of his country's security forces.

The two leaders signed a "strategic partnership" that formalised long-term US involvement in Afghanistan in terms of defense as well as reconstruction Monday. 

Bush said: "It's a partnership that establishes regular high level exchange on political, security and economic issues of mutual interest."

On the crucial question of the control of Afghan security, on which Karzai had asserted establishing stronger grip by Kabul, Bush implied that Afghanistan was not yet ready to deal with it on its own.

Bush said: "In terms of more say over our military, our relationship is one of cooperate and consult. Of course our troops will respond to US commanders, but our US commanders and our diplomatic mission there is in a consultative relationship with the government. It's a free society.

"There is a democratically-elected government. They've invited us in, and we'll consult with them in terms of how to achieve mutual goals, and that is to rout out the remnants of Al Qaeda, to deal with those folks who would come and like to create harm to US citizens and/or Afghan citizens."

Karzai addressed the question of the 2002 prisoner abuse, where two prisoners died in Bagram, and said several times that he did not blame the American government or people.

"The prisoner abuse thing is not at all a thing that we attribute to anybody else but those individuals. The Afghan people are grateful, very, very much to the American people. They recognize that individual acts do not reflect either on governments or on societies.

"These things happen everywhere. As we are sad, we recognize that the American people, kind as they are to Afghanistan, have nothing to do with that," Karzai said.

In two television interviews prior to his meeting with Bush, Karzai had spoken in terms of gaining a greater control of the Afghan security and expressed unhappiness over the prisoner abuse.

Karzai also spoke about the riots across the country in the aftermath of the Newsweek report that alleged desecration of the Quran by American interrogators in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, "Those demonstrations were in reality not related to the Newsweek story," he said.

"They were more against the elections in Afghanistan. They were more against the progress in Afghanistan. They were more against the strategic partnership with the United States. We know who did it. We know the guys. We know the people behind those demonstrations."