Major Garrett: Karzai to meet with Bush

White House Correspondent Major Garrett

(CNN) -- Afghan interim leader Hamid Karzai arrived in Washington Sunday and is scheduled to meet Monday with President Bush. Karzai is the first Afghan leader to visit Washington since King Zahir Shah, who was later deposed, was invited in September 1963 by President John F. Kennedy. CNN White House Correspondent Major Garrett has a preview of the visit.

GARRETT: Hamid Karzai ... will meet with President Bush ... at the White House [Monday] and be the president's special guest of honor at the State of the Union address on Tuesday. There's so much to discuss between the new interim leader of the Afghan government and the U.S. president. Let's go over some of the most important issues.

First and foremost for this leader of the new Afghanistan: security. There are literally thousands of people throughout Afghanistan who continue to carry arms. There are warlords positioning against Karzai and others within the Afghan government still trying to cover pockets of Afghanistan with their own control. Those warlords have to be brought under control. There has to be ... some semblance of security returned to the country before other important rebuilding goals can be achieved.

There is going to be some significant talk about formalizing diplomatic and military ties between the two governments. There's really nothing standing between the formalization of those ties, but talks will continue to accelerate that process.

And there's so much about rebuilding Afghan society. We're talking about a country of about 27 million people; a per capita income of less than $800; 32 percent literacy.

Hamid Karzai wants to open schools, reopen hospitals, try to build the foundations of a society that has really been ravaged by war for more than 20 years.

To do those things, the Afghan government needs some financial assistance.

Just a week ago ... the world community ponied up about $4.5 billion in pledges over the next five years to the Afghan government, and $1.8 billion due [is] to arrive this year. The United States government has offered millions in aid and unfrozen some $200 million in ... assets -- frozen when the Taliban government took control of Afghanistan. ...

CNN: The Bush administration seems to be awfully busy as ... the president leads up to Tuesday's State of the Union address. And Sunday -- with Donald Rumsfeld going to [the U.S. Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, Cuba] -- ... the talk is [about] this internal strife in the Bush administration about how to classify these detainees. What is the source of this argument going on?

GARRETT: Well, it's essentially a disagreement between lawyers. Lawyers at the Justice Department, lawyers at the State Department, and lawyers at the Pentagon are all sending to the White House ... their legal understanding of what the Geneva Conventions say and do not say about these detainees -- how they should be classified.

Within the next week we are likely to hear from the president on exactly what the classification policy is going to be. ... And essentially there's no disagreement on whether or not these detainees are prisoners of war. No one seems to think that they are. However, Secretary of State Colin Powell has said they should be given some Geneva Convention protections. ...

When the president makes that decision [regarding the detainees], he knows full well the U.S. government will be bound by that decision as to the way all of these detainees are dealt with and all future detainees are dealt with. So the administration wants to get it right the first time.

It's responding to international pressure to be as humane as possible, but they are also responding to internal pressure from more hawkish voices in the administration saying these are very, very bad actors. We need to treat them very seriously. We need to interrogate them, and we need to get information from them as soon as possible.