He cited the 2010 near-collapse of Kabul Bank because of mismanagement and hundreds of millions of dollars in questionable loans. The scandal created economic and political turmoil, prompted the freezing of some international aid and became a symbol of Afghanistan’s deep-rooted corruption.

Criminal investigations against the bank’s top two executives, several bank officials and others are under way, but so far no one has been convicted of wrongdoing.

“Kabul Bank stands out as a symbol of concern where everybody appears to know what happened but the most effective action taken has yet to be seen,” Burt said.

He urged the Afghan government to take visible steps to address corruption ahead of a donor conference for long-term development funds in Tokyo in July.

Burt singled out three main challenges. One of them is making sure the nation’s vast mineral wealth is properly developed, so that the Afghan people reap the benefits in terms of jobs and revenue.

Afghanistan also must ensure that human rights and opportunities for all, including women, are supported by the state, he said.

As for the “scourge of corruption,” Burt said it’s “not easily dealt with.”

“But some realistic sign that it’s taken very seriously — and should be taken seriously — is very important, not just to the United Kingdom and to our taxpayers, but to the international community as it considers its position in Tokyo and beyond,” he said.

British Defense Secretary Philip Hammond, who is also in Afghanistan, visited British forces and met on Thursday with President Hamid Karzai.

He reassured Karzai that Britain would be committed to Afghanistan after 2014, when the foreign troops end their combat mission.

They also come at a time when international troops have stepped up training and mentoring of Afghan soldiers, police and government workers so that Afghans can take the lead and the foreign forces can go home. The success of that partnership is key to the U.S.-led coalition’s strategy to withdraw most foreign combat forces by the end of 2014.

U.S. Marine Gen. John Allen, the top commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, told reporters at the Pentagon that these types of attacks are characteristic of any warfare involving insurgents.

“We experienced these in Iraq. We experienced them in Vietnam,” Allen said. “On any occasion where you’re dealing with an insurgency and where you’re also growing an indigenous force … the enemy’s going to do all that they can to disrupt both the counterinsurgency operations” and the developing nation’s security forces.

Since 2007, an estimated 80 NATO service members were killed by Afghan security forces, according to an Associated Press tally, which is based on Pentagon figures released in February. More than 75 percent of the attacks have occurred in the past two years.

Sixteen NATO service members — 18 percent of the 84 foreign troops killed so far this year — have been shot and killed by Afghan soldiers and policemen or militants disguised in their uniforms, according to the AP tally.

In one incident Monday, two British service members were killed by an Afghan soldier in front of the main gate of a joint civilian-military base in southern Afghanistan, the coalition said. Another NATO service member was shot and killed at a checkpoint in eastern Afghanistan by a man who was believed to be a member of a village-level fighting force the U.S. is fostering in hopes of countering the Taliban insurgency. The Pentagon confirmed Monday that the dead soldier was American but did not release further details.

Maj. Ian Lawrence, a British military spokesman for Task Force Helmand, said one of the British troops was a Royal Marine and the other was a soldier from the British Adjutant General’s Corps. They were killed in front of the base in Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital of Helmand province.

The soldier, who had been in the Afghan National Army for four years, arrived at the gate in an army vehicle, said Ghulam Farooq Parwani, deputy commander of the Afghan army in Helmand. He was able to get close to the British troops by claiming that he had been assigned to provide security for a delegation of government officials from Kabul who were visiting the base Monday, Parwani added.

“He got close to the foreign troops — three or four meters (yards) — and he opened fire,” Parwani said. “Then the foreign troops killed him.”

It is not the first time that Afghan security forces have killed their British counterparts. On Nov. 3, 2009, a rogue Afghan policeman killed five British soldiers who had been advising Afghan police at a checkpoint in Helmand province.

Taliban spokesman Qari Yousef Ahmadi said the shooter was an Afghan soldier who was in close contact with insurgents and had notified the Taliban of his planned attack before carrying it out.

However, Wahid Muzhda, a former Taliban foreign ministry official and an analyst on issues related to the group, said the Taliban were not behind most of the latest killings.

“All these killings are not linked to the Taliban,” Muzhda said. “The recent Quran burnings and the shooting spree — the killing of children— are affecting the minds of the Afghan soldiers. They think the foreigners are looking out for their own interests. They think if the foreigners are coming here to defend Afghanistan, why are they killing children?”

The trust between the Afghan forces and their international mentors is being undermined, he said.

“How is the mentor supposed to teach if he is afraid of the Afghan soldiers? They have weapons. How can he relax?”

While they acknowledge that these type of attacks are on the rise, coalition officials say they must be viewed in context. They say there are about 100,000 coalition troops working side-by-side with more than 300,000 Afghan troops.

“In most cases, the relationship is very strong. They know each other well,” Allen said. “We have taken steps necessary on our side to protect ourselves with respect to, in fact, sleeping arrangements, internal defenses associated with those small bases in which we operate, the posture of our forces, to have someone always overwatching our forces.

“On the Afghan side, they are doing the same thing. I mean, they’re helping the troops to understand how to recognize radicalization or the emergence of extremism in … individuals who may in fact be suspect.”

Monday’s attack came two weeks after a U.S. soldier allegedly went on a pre-dawn shooting rampage in neighboring Kandahar province, killing 17 Afghan civilians — four men, four women and nine children.

That incident followed the burning of Qurans at a U.S. base north of Kabul last month. The U.S. apologized for the burning, saying the Islamic texts were mistakenly sent to a garbage burn pit Feb. 20 at Bagram Air Field. But the incident raised to a full boil what had been simmering animosity toward outsiders.

Deadly protests raged around the nation for six days — the most visible example of a deep-seated resentment bred by what Afghans view is a general lack of respect for their culture and religion.

During the protests, Afghan soldiers killed six American troops. Two were killed in Kandahar province, two in Nangarhar province in the east and the other two were found dead with shots to the back of the head inside the Interior Ministry in Kabul.

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Associated Press writers Amir Shah in Kabul, Mirwais Khan in Kandahar, and David Stringer and Cassandra Vinograd in London and Lolita C. Baldor in Washington contributed to this report.

It’s been nearly 29 months since an Army psychiatrist, Maj. Nidal Hasan, allegedly killed 13 and injured two dozen more at Fort Hood, Texas. His trial is scheduled to begin in June. And it’s been 21 months since the military charged intelligence analyst Bradley Manning with leaking hundreds of thousands of pages of classified information. It took nine months before he was deemed competent to stand trial.

The Bales case is likely to be equally complex, involving questions of his mental state and the role that the stresses of war and possible previous head injuries may have played in his alleged actions. Most of the eyewitnesses are the Afghan villagers and survivors who may be brought in for the trial.

The military on Friday charged Bales with 17 counts of murder, six counts of attempted murder and six counts of assault in the March 11 pre-dawn massacre in two southern Afghanistan villages near his base. The father of two from Lake Tapps, Wash., was officially informed of the 29 charges just before noon at the U.S. military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., where he is confined.

The maximum punishment for a premeditated murder conviction is death, dishonorable discharge from the armed forces, reduction to the lowest enlisted grade and total forfeiture of pay and allowances, according to Col. Gary Kolb, a spokesman for U.S. forces in Afghanistan. The mandatory minimum sentence is life imprisonment with the chance of parole.

The charges offered few details of what happened that night. But the 38-year-old soldier is accused of walking off his base with his 9mm pistol and M-4 rifle, which was outfitted with a grenade launcher, killing four men, four women, two boys and seven girls and burning some of the bodies. The ages of the children were not disclosed.

In the most detailed descriptions of the shootings to date, the charges say Bales shot a young girl in the head, a young boy in the thigh, a man in the neck and a woman in the chest and groin. The documents also say that he “shot at” another girl and boy, but apparently did not hit them.

The attack occurred in the Panjwai district of Kandahar Province, the spiritual birthplace of the Taliban. The dead bodies were found in Balandi and Alkozai villages — one north and one south of the base.

Members of the Afghan delegation investigating the killings said one Afghan guard working from midnight to 2 a.m. saw a U.S. soldier return to the base around 1:30 a.m. Another Afghan soldier who replaced the first and worked until 4 a.m. said he saw a U.S. soldier leaving the base at 2:30 a.m. It’s unknown whether the Afghan guards saw the same U.S. soldier. If the gunman acted alone, information from the Afghan guards would suggest that he returned to base in between the shooting rampages.

It also is not known whether the suspect used grenades, Kolb said. The grenade launcher attachment is added to the standard issue M-4 rifle for some soldiers but not all, he said. Bales was assigned to provide force protection at the base.

The case against him is the worst allegation of killing of civilians by an American in Afghanistan and has severely strained U.S.-Afghan ties at a critical time in the decade-old war.

Not addressed in the charges are suggestions that Bales may have been drinking. On Friday, a senior U.S. defense official said Bales was drinking in the hours before the attack on Afghan villagers, violating a U.S. military order banning alcohol in war zones. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the charges before they were filed.

U.S. officials, however, have said that additional charges could be filed as time goes on. Bales’ civilian attorney, John Henry Browne, said Friday the government will have a hard time proving its case and that his client’s mental state will be an important issue. Bales was on his fourth tour of duty, having served three tours in Iraq, where he suffered head and foot injuries.

The charges set in motion what will likely be a lengthy military justice process.

“Usually in military and civilian criminal cases, delay accrues to the benefit of the accused. So there will be some maneuvering to put it off a while,” said Gary Solis, retired Marine prosecutor and adjunct law professor at Georgetown University. “I think it’s many months before we’re going to see this thing go to trial, if it ever goes to trial.”

Bales may face what the military calls a “sanity board,” to determine his mental state at the time, and whether he is competent to stand trial.

Since Bales was assigned to a unit based at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state— the 2nd Battalion, 3rd Infantry Regiment of the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team of the 2nd Infantry Division — the charges were sent Friday to a special court-martial convening authority, the 17th Fires Brigade, an artillery unit at the post. Lewis-McChord spokesman Lt. Col. Gary Dangerfield said officials at the post will have the legal responsibility of trying and managing the case against Bales, but it was not clear where the proceedings would actually take place.

Maj. Christopher Ophardt at Lewis-McChord said the preliminary hearing may not take place for a few months and it would likely be several more months after that before a trial would begin — perhaps two years from now depending on motions and other pretrial actions.

Jeffrey Addicott, who previously served as the senior legal adviser to the U.S. Army’s Special Forces, said the military justice system typically moves faster than civilian courts. But he said the international political implications may cause this case to drag on for years.

“When we have these high-publicity cases, the military becomes like a deer in the headlights. They have just one speed: extremely slow,” Addicott said, adding that he expects the defense team to use all tactics to slow the process.

According to military lawyers and experts, now that the charges have been filed, the next step is for the military is to decide whether there is enough evidence to refer the charges to a preliminary hearing. That hearing, what the military calls an Article 32, would determine whether there’s probable cause to believe a crime was committed and that the person charged did it.

Once the Article 32 is over, the hearing officer recommends to a general officer whether or not the case should go to trial. That general officer then decides whether the case should go to a court-martial in front of a military judge.

Throughout the proceedings, the lawyers will be able to file a wide range of motions, including requests for more time to review evidence.

Browne said he thinks the U.S. government will have difficulty proving its case against Bales because “there is no crime scene” and a lack of important physical evidence like fingerprints. And he has said he wants to visit Afghanistan.

Prosecutors, meanwhile, will rely on evidence collected from the villages, including any statements by witnesses and Afghan civilians who were injured that night, as well as any observations by other soldiers about Bales’ conduct and his movement on or off the base.

Two military defense attorneys also have been assigned to his case.

Ophardt said Bales’ family is still living on base but has the option of moving off at any time.

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Reichmann reported from Kabul. AP Broadcast reporter Sagar Meghani in Washington and Associated Press writers Mirwais Khan in Kandahar and Michael R. Baker in Olympia, Wash., contributed to this report.

It’s unclear what prompted the killings, but the case has drawn new attention to the debate over mental health care for the troops, who have experienced record suicide rates and high incidences of post-traumatic stress and brain injuries during repeated deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Six other Afghans — a man, a woman and four children — were wounded in Panjwai district of Kandahar province, the spiritual birthplace of the Taliban. Bales also was charged with six counts of attempted murder and six counts of assault in those cases, according to Col. Gary Kolb, a spokesman for U.S. forces in Afghanistan who disclosed information from the charging document.

Bales, a father of two from Lake Tapps, Washington, was officially informed of the 29 charges just before noon local time at the U.S. military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he is confined.

His civilian attorney, John Henry Browne, said Friday that he believes the government will have a hard time proving its case and that his client’s mental state will be an important issue. Bales was on his fourth tour of duty, having served three tours in Iraq, where he suffered head and foot injuries.

The decision to charge him with premeditated murder suggests that prosecutors plan to argue that he consciously conceived the killings. A military legal official for U.S. forces in Afghanistan who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the case, noted that premeditated murder is not something that has to have been contemplated for a long time.

The maximum punishment for a premeditated murder conviction is death, dishonorable discharge from the armed forces, reduction to the lowest enlisted grade and total forfeiture of pay and allowances, Kolb said. The mandatory minimum sentence is life imprisonment with the chance of parole.

Legal experts have said the death penalty would be unlikely in the case. The military hasn’t executed a service member since 1961 when an Army ammunition handler was hanged for raping an 11-year-old girl in Austria. None of the six men currently on death row at Fort Leavenworth was convicted for atrocities against foreign civilians.

The charging document did not provide details about the killings, leaving the timeline unclear. The dead bodies were found in Balandi and Alkozai villages — one north and one south of the base.

Members of the Afghan delegation investigating the killings said one Afghan guard working from midnight to 2 a.m. saw a U.S. soldier return to the base around 1:30 a.m. Another Afghan soldier who replaced the first and worked until 4 a.m. said he saw a U.S. soldier leaving the base at 2:30 a.m. It’s unknown whether the Afghan guards saw the same U.S. soldier. If the gunman acted alone, information from the Afghan guards would suggest that he returned to base in between the shooting sprees.

It also is not known whether the suspect used grenades, Kolb said. The grenade launcher attachment is added to the standard issue M-4 rifle for some soldiers but not all, he said. Bales was assigned to provide force protection at the base.

The pre-dawn shooting spree has further frayed ties between U.S. troops and President Hamid Karzai as the two nations are negotiating agreements for America’s military footprint in Afghanistan after most international combat forces withdraw by the end of 2014. After the shootings, Karzai reiterated his demand that foreign troops leave posts near Afghan villages and pull back to larger bases.

The killings also have fueled anti-American sentiment in a country where violent protests raged for nearly a week last month after Muslim holy books and other Islamic texts ended up in a garbage burn pit at a U.S. base.

“By the laws of Islam, the soldier should be hanged,” Dost Mohammad, a shopkeeper in Kandahar, the provincial capital, said Friday. “While other countries’ laws say that this individual should be given a life sentence, from our point of view and that of other Muslims, this guy should be hanged.”

Afghan officials and villagers maintain that 16 civilians were killed. The U.S. military never announced a death toll, but said Friday that investigators had collected enough evidence to charge Bales with killing 17 civilians.

U.S. officials are working with Afghan officials to compensate relatives of the victims, money that likely would be disbursed to the eldest male of the family. Eleven of those who died were from one family.

Bales’ lawyer, who is based in the state of Washington, has said that his client remembers very little or nothing from the time the military believes he went on the rampage.

Browne told CBS’ “This Morning” on Friday that his client’s memory problems predate the shooting spree. Browne said Bales had earlier suffered a “serious” concussion that was not treated “for a variety of reasons,” which Browne did not explain.

Browne said he thinks the U.S. government will have difficulty proving its case against Bales because “there is no crime scene” and a lack of important physical evidence like fingerprints.

Two military defense attorneys also have been assigned to his case.

Browne has said that he wants to visit Afghanistan.

U.S. military officials said they would do what they can to protect Bales’ legal team in the event of such a visit but warned the shootings have heightened tension between U.S. troops and villagers in the area, and decisions about where the legal team could safely travel would have to be on a case-by-case basis at the time of any visit.

The charges launch what is likely to be a lengthy legal process.

Bales was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 3rd Infantry Regiment of the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, of the 2nd Infantry Division, which is based at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington. The U.S. Forces-Afghanistan has sent the charges to a special court-martial convening authority, the 17th Fires Brigade, an artillery unit based in Fort Lewis, Washington.

Lewis-McChord spokesman Lt. Col. Gary Dangerfield said Friday that officials at that base will have the legal responsibility of trying and managing the case against Bales, but it was not clear where the proceedings will actually take place, noting that Fort Leavenworth has the most updated security.

The commanding officer of that brigade has several options ranging from taking no action to ordering an Article 32 investigation, which is comparable to a preliminary hearing or grand jury process in U.S. civilian courts.

During the investigation, the defense will have an opportunity to see evidence and cross-examine government witnesses. An investigating officer will issue a report at the end of the probe in which he can recommend a court-martial; and add, delete or modify the charges. A mental assessment for Bales also is expected to be ordered.

He could be charged with other offenses later, according to the legal official. On Friday, a senior U.S. defense official said Bales was drinking in the hours before the attack on Afghan villagers, violating a U.S. military order banning alcohol in war zones.

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Associated Press writers Mirwais Khan in Kandahar and Mike Baker in Olympia, Washington, contributed to this report.

The lawyer for Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, who is accused in the March 11 killings of the 16 civilians, has said that his client was upset because a buddy had lost a leg in an explosion on March 9.

It’s unclear if the bombing cited by attorney John Henry Browne was the same as the one described by the villagers that prompted the alleged threats. After a meeting at a military prison in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, Browne said Bales told him a roadside bomb blew off the leg of one of his friends two days before the shootings occurred.

A spokesman for the U.S. military declined to give any information on the bombing or even confirm that it occurred, citing the investigation of the shootings. He also declined to comment on the allegation that U.S. troops threatened retaliation.

“The shooting incident as well as any possibilities that led up to it or might be associated with it will be investigated,” Lt. Col. Jimmie Cummings, a spokesman for U.S. forces in Afghanistan, said Tuesday.

Bales, 38, is suspected of leaving a U.S. base in Panjwai district of Kandahar province, entering homes and gunning down nine children, four men and three women before dawn on March 11 in the villages of Balandi and Alkozai. Mokhoyan is about 500 yards (meters) east of the base.

The shootings have further strained ties between the U.S. government and President Hamid Karzai who has accused the U.S. military of not cooperating with a delegation he appointed to investigate the killings.

Karzai’s investigative team is not convinced that one soldier could have single-handedly left his base, walked to the two villages, and carried out the killings and set fire to some of the victims’ bodies. The U.S. military has said that even though its investigation is continuing, everything currently points to one shooter.

The U.S. military does not release information on incidents such as roadside bombings if no coalition troops are killed so it has been impossible to independently confirm the eyewitness accounts.

Ghulam Rasool, a tribal elder from Panjwai district, gave an account of the bombing at a March 16 meeting in Kabul with Karzai in the wake of the shootings.

“After the incident, they took the wreckage of their destroyed tank and their wounded people from the area,” Rasool said. “After that, they came back to the village nearby the explosion site.

“The soldiers called all the people to come out of their houses and from the mosque,” he said.

“The Americans told the villagers ‘A bomb exploded on our vehicle. … We will get revenge for this incident by killing at least 20 of your people,’” Rasool said. “These are the reasons why we say they took their revenge by killing women and children in the villages.”

Naek Mohammad, who lives in Mokhoyan, told the AP that he was inside his home when he heard an explosion on March 8.

“At first I thought it was an airstrike,” Mohammad said. “After some time I came out and talked with my neighbor. He told me that there was an explosion on NATO forces.”

Mohammad said that as the two discussed the incident, two Afghan soldiers approached them and ordered them to join other men from the village who had been told to stand against a wall.

“One of the villagers asked what was happening,” he said. “The Afghan army soldier told him ‘Shut up and stand there.’”

Mohammad said a U.S. soldier, speaking through a translator, then said: “I know you are all involved and you support the insurgents. So now, you will pay for it — you and your children will pay for this.’”

Mohammad’s neighbor, Bakht Mohammad, and Ahmad Shah Khan, also of Mokhoyan, gave similar accounts.

The U.S. soldiers arrived in the village with their Afghan army counterparts and made many of the male villagers stand against a wall, Khan said.

“It looked like they were going to shoot us, and I was very afraid,” said Khan. “Then a NATO soldier said through his translator that even our children will pay for this. Now they have done it and taken their revenge.”

Several Afghan officials, including Kandahar lawmaker Abdul Rahim Ayubi, said people in the two villages that were attacked told them the same story.

Mohammad Sarwar Usmani, one of several lawmakers who went to the area to investigate the shootings, said that after hearing accounts by villagers, he believed their assertions that the slayings were carried out by more than one gunman and that they were in retaliation for the bombing.

Usmani also said that the Afghan National Army had confirmed to him that an explosion occurred near Mokhoyan on March 8.

Abdul Salam, an Afghan soldier, showed an AP reporter in Panjwai district on March 13 the site of the blast, which made a large crater in the road. The soldier said the explosion occurred three days before the shootings. Salam said he helped gather the men in the village, but that he was not close enough to hear what the troops said to them.

The identity of the soldier who allegedly threatened the villagers is not known.

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Riechmann reported from Kabul.