KABUL, Afghanistan — President Barack Obama and the Afghan leader, Hamid Karzai, had what a U.S. official called a “serious and positive” discussion on Wednesday night that the Afghans confirmed had made progress toward resolving an increasingly acrimonious dispute that had their two governments and their militaries at loggerheads for weeks over rules for detaining terrorism suspects in the field.
In a videoconference Wednesday evening, Karzai and Obama had a wide-ranging conversation touching almost every hot-button issue that has complicated the U.S. plans to draw down its forces, senior U.S. and Afghan officials said.
Most important, they began to resolve the two countries’ differences on rules for indefinitely detaining terrorism suspects without trial, known as administrative detention, officials from the two countries said. U.S. military commanders insist on assurances that terrorism suspects they detain in the field will not be summarily released.
The Afghan Constitution and laws do not provide explicitly for indefinite detention, but Karzai has now ordered his judiciary “to come up with a legal framework that allows us to keep those people who pose a serious security threat,” Aimal Faizi, Karzai’s spokesman, said Thursday.
While other problems also are urgent, the conflict over the Americans’ insistence that some detainees should continue to be held without being charged had begun to spill out in public and undermine diplomatic relations, said people involved in the discussions.
The Americans have refused to turn over the last 650 prisoners they are holding at Parwan, the U.S.-built detention center adjacent to the Bagram Air Base, until the issue is resolved.
“President Karzai had a good conversation with President Obama last night,” Faizi said.
“There were clear and frank talks — they started in general terms, then got very specific on the details regarding the Afghan prisoners.
“After last night’s conference, this should be solved,” Faizi said.
“We’re working to frame this legal issue. The judiciary will look at our laws and soon come up with a legal framework that allows us to keep those people who pose a serious security threat.”
A senior U.S. official who characterized the conversation as “a serious and positive discussion” said the call went on longer than planned.
“It was very matter-offact,” the official said. “They talked about resolving it, they didn’t talk about setting a legal framework to do it,” he said.
But he added that if the Afghan spokesman had alluded to such a framework, then “that’s good.”
The friendly tone was a turnaround from the past three weeks, in which the Afghans have been increasingly confrontational in news statements and have suggested that the Americans are flouting the country’s sovereignty.
The Americans, while keeping much of the argument behind the scenes, “were dug in,” a Western diplomat said.
There have been many ups and downs in the relationship between the two countries, but the dispute over detainees has come at a particularly delicate time between Afghanistan and the United States because of deepening worries over killings of U.S. and other coalition troops by infiltrators and disgruntled Afghan security force members and because of the provocative anti-Islam video produced in the United States that last week set off often-violent protests across the Muslim world.
The dispute over detention has centered on the terms of a memorandum of understanding signed in March in which the Americans agreed to hand over all the Afghan detainees held at the detention facility in Parwan.
The memorandum specifically states that “Afghanistan has established an administrative detention regime.”
But there were lingering disagreements among senior Afghan officials about whether the Afghan Constitution allowed for indefinitely holding dangerous prisoners who could not be tried because of a lack of admissible evidence.
Then on Tuesday, Karzai’s council of legal advisers met and told him that there was no provision for detention without trial in Afghan law.
Now Karzai has resolved to have his judiciary draft language that would allow detention without trial, Faizi said.
The NATO commander, Gen. John Allen, has privately expressed concerns that in the absence of an administrative detention process, dangerous insurgents, who were captured on the basis of intelligence, which could not be shared in court, might be released and return to the battlefield, as has happened in the past.
Although the Afghans say they do not have a way to hold suspects without trial, they are signatories to the Second Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions, which recognizes the right to detain people as inherent in any armed conflict and provides for it to be done in a humane way.
The Americans had assumed that their accession to that convention would allow them to put such a system in place, but some senior Afghan legal experts disagreed.
As the Afghans began to air doubts about continued detention, the Americans halted the transfer of the remaining 650 detainees they had captured since the memorandum was signed.
That infuriated the Afghans, who viewed it as a violation of the memorandum and an infringement of their sovereignty.
The Afghan government would like to end as much as possible the practice of having foreign troops detain Afghans, Faizi said. And, when they have to, they should not hold them for more than 72 hours, he said.
That could prove far too restrictive to the U.S. military, which wants to hold suspected terrorists for weeks if not months, to complete detailed interrogations.
People close to the discussions over the detentions say they hope to reach some compromise between 72 hours and the weeks, or even months, requested by military interrogators.
Front Section, Pages 7 on 09/21/2012