WASHINGTON, Dec 7: A group of US lawmakers urged the Obama administration on Friday to find a new leadership in Afghanistan after President Hamid Karzai said the United States shared blame for the growing insecurity and corruption in his country.

“For too long, the United States has backed the wrong horse in Kabul,” said the lawmakers in a letter to Defence Secretary Leon Panetta.

“If America does not find new leadership in Afghanistan, leaders rooted in the country with a solid record of fighting the Taliban, all the blood and money the US has spent since 2001 will have been wasted,” the lawmakers warned.

“Part of the insecurity is coming to us from the structures that Nato and America created in Afghanistan,” President Karzai told an American television channel, NBC News, although he also acknowledged that much of the country's violence was caused by insurgent groups.

Mr Karzai, who is serving his second five-year term, said he had sent a letter to US President Barack Obama saying that Afghanistan would not sign any new security agreements with the United States until hundreds of prisoners held at the Bagram base were transferred to Afghan authorities.

The US and Afghanistan are currently engaged in complex bilateral talks on a security pact to determine the US role after the withdrawal of its combat troops by 2014.President Karzai said the inmates at the Bagram detention centre were being held in breach of an agreement he and Obama signed in March and must be handed over immediately.

Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, who initiated the campaign against the Afghan president, also urged the Obama administration not to accept Mr Karzai’s demand to give him complete control over the Nato-run detention centre near Kabul.

Mr Rohrabacher, who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, noted that President Karzai was blaming the US for much of the insecurity and corruption in his country.

“The Afghan President’s outrageous statements are dangerously similar to language used last week by an Iranian official who was meeting with Afghan officials in Tehran,” the congressman said, “Mr Karzai’s use of the same anti-American language only a few days later cannot be mere coincidence.”

He urged Secretary Panetta to “to dismiss Karzai’s demands” and “use the immense leverage the US commands in Afghanistan to insure that American lives and interests are fully protected.”

Mr Rohrabacher noted that the Bagram prison “holds dangerous terrorists and insurgents (who) must be kept in (US) custody or they will return to the battlefield and kill again.”

Afghan authorities had released many such prisoners in the past, he added.

In his interview to NBC News, President Karzai claimed having control over a prison on its soil was a matter of Afghan sovereignty, but Mr Rohrabacher rejected his claim.

“American armed forces are an arm of another sovereign power, the United States. They have the right to determine what to do with the enemies they capture, and their first duty is to act in the way that best protects American lives,” he wrote.President Karzai raised a number of sensitive issues in his interview; saying that he had signed a strategic partnership agreement with the US, hoping that the nature of US activities in Afghanistan will change but it did not.