“The document finalized today provides a strong foundation for the security of Afghanistan, the region and the world and is a document for the development of the region,” Afghan National Security Adviser Rangin Dadfar Spanta was quoted as saying.

U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker and Spanta initialed the document at a ceremony in the capital, a statement from President Hamid Karzai’s office said. U.S. embassy spokesman Gavin Sundwall confirmed the same information.

“The agreement is now ready for signature by both the presidents,” Karzai’s office said.

At the signing, Spanta said the agreement had taken more than a year and a half of work, according to the Afghan statement.

Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales was charged Friday with 17 counts of premeditated murder and could face a possible death penalty if convicted. But that has done little to ease the pain of those left behind, who are demanding justice as they struggle to rebuild their shattered lives.

While no motive for the killings has been proffered, much of the discussion in the U.S. has focused on what could have caused the soldier to snap and whether the trauma of warfare and multiple deployments is at least partly to blame. Bales, himself a father of two from Lake Tapps, Washington, has been confined at the U.S. military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

Bales also was charged with six counts of attempted murder and six counts of assault in the March 11 pre-dawn massacre in Balandi and Alkozai, two southern Afghanistan villages near his base in Panjwai district of Kandahar Province, the birthplace of the Taliban.

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.

Afghan officials and villagers have counted 16 dead: 12 in Balandi and four in Alkozai. The U.S. military has charged Bales with 17 murders without explaining the discrepancy.

Wazir — who also lost his wife, five other children ages 2 to 15, his mother, his brother, his sister-in-law and his nephew — said he would travel to the U.S. for the trial if given the opportunity but the death penalty for just one man would not be enough. The only child he has left is his 4-year-old son Habib, who was with him in another town when the shootings occurred.

“They took everything from me,” he said.

Wazir, who is in his mid-thirties and splits his time tending his grape fields and helping with a family electronics store, was not home in Balandi that night because he had taken his youngest son to the nearby border town of Spin Boldak to have dinner with his cousins. The area is dangerous so Wazir and his son spent the night. As they were getting ready to return home in the morning, Wazir got a phone call.

The caller said Wazir’s house had been the target of a U.S. attack and some relatives had been injured, but didn’t mention any dead. He rushed home to find hundreds of people gathered outside around some bodies that they were preparing take to Kandahar city for a funeral.

“I didn’t know that all of them were members of my family,” Wazir recounted as he sat in a friend’s courtyard in the nearby market town of Harmara, where he is staying to avoid the ghosts waiting for him at home. As he spoke, he stared down at his hands, focusing on the knife tattoo on his right knuckles.

People tried to pull him into the crowd but he said he needed to check on his family first.

“Then one of my relatives hugged me and said, ‘Nobody is there for you to talk to.’”

Still disbelieving, Wazir ran to his house and found the kitchen still filled with smoke, ashes and blood.

“I was crying and I said to my uncle, ‘Tell me, is anyone in my family alive?’ And my uncle said, ‘It is God’s will. Pull yourself together and come out.’”

Neighbors told him they had heard the gunshots but were too afraid to leave their homes. When the shooting stopped and they entered his house, they found corpses on fire. Wazir and his fellow villagers buried his family, then Wazir went to the Afghan capital, Kabul, to tell President Hamid Karzai his story.

Afghan officials have made payments to all the families as compensation for the deaths, but Wazir said he’s looking for justice, and he’s not sure that the Americans are really interested in finding out what happened.

He’s suspicious, he explained, because U.S. forces said from the very beginning that only one shooter was involved, even though some accounts suggested multiple attackers. Wazir himself still thinks it is likely others were involved.

“It shows that they are not interested in the truth. At least they should wait for an investigation,” Wazir said. “They claim that it is one person who did it, if that is the case they have to prove it.”

Wazir says his two elder sons, 15-year-old Asmatullah and 9-year-old Faizullah, were both in school. Asmatullah was more responsible, but Faizullah was the clever one. He thought Faizulla might become a doctor some day.

Then he brought up his 2-year-old daughter, Palwasha, and his eyes brimmed over with tears.

“I can still feel her small hands on my face and feel her pulling my beard,” Wazir said as he cried and shivered in the warm air. “Even when I saw her burned body, she still had that beautiful smile.”

While Wazir lost the largest number of family members, other villagers also are dealing with the trauma two weeks after the deadly rampage.

Baran Akhon, whose brother Mohammad Dawood was also killed in Balandi, said he’s not sure how he is going to support his brother’s family. He has brought all of them to live with him in Kandahar city, but he barely makes enough selling cigarettes and other small items from his pushcart to support his own family.

Another man whose wife, cousin, brother and 3-year-old granddaughter were killed in the neighboring village of Alkozai said people there are too scared to sleep alone, so they cram as many people into one house as possible each night. Saeed Jan also complained that U.S. troops continue to patrol the area.

“There is still blood in our houses. It hasn’t been removed. And they are moving through our streets again. It’s like they are pushing us, just showing that they can,” Jan said.

He also says monetary payouts will not suffice.

“Even millions of dollars would not be enough for my brother. First they should give us justice and punish all the people who did this,” Akhon said.

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Vogt reported from Kabul.

Like many rules in a war zone, the U.S. military’s General Order No. 1 forbidding alcohol in both Afghanistan and Iraq is not always followed to the letter. Even in these strictly Muslim countries, there are ways to access liquor. Amid the tight-knit camaraderie of a stressful battlefield, officers sometimes turn a blind eye — or even partake themselves.

In Iraq, booze was easy to come by in Baghdad’s Green Zone and on some bases. In Afghanistan, soldiers from many other NATO countries are allowed to imbibe. That means there’s some “alcohol spillover” to American troops on large multinational bases. In both countries, foreign contractors dealing with the U.S. military — most of whom were not covered by the order — bring in their own supplies and are a source that soldiers can turn to.

German troops stationed in northern Afghanistan are allowed two beers a day at their main base in northern Afghanistan, but not at smaller camps. In Kabul, one military base that mainly houses European troops boasts two liquor stores.

On Kandahar Air Field, the main international base in southern Afghanistan, Canadian forces used to have regular beer nights before they pulled their forces out this past summer. Each person was limited to two beers and half a bottle of wine.

At these large installations, U.S. soldiers also sometimes manage to get alcohol in packages sent by family and friends, often hidden in other types of bottles.

Finding alcohol is more difficult in more remote areas of the country or on smaller bases, like the one from which the soldier allegedly slipped out to start his shooting spree.

Some rural Afghans make homemade wine out of raisins but in general few Afghans drink — so alcohol would have to be brought in by soldiers or brewed using local ingredients.

A senior U.S. defense official told The Associated Press earlier this week that investigators had found alcohol at the soldier’s base, Camp Belambai in Panjwai district. The official spoke anonymously to discuss an ongoing investigation.

The suspect, a 38-year-old staff sergeant whose name has not been released, is said by military officials to have left the base at 3 a.m. on Sunday, walking to two nearby villages where they say he barged into homes and opened fire, killing 16 people, including nine children.

The sergeant’s lawyer, Seattle attorney John Henry Browne, disputed reports that a combination of alcohol, stress and domestic issues caused the suspect to snap. He said the family said they were unaware of any drinking problem. He said that a day before the rampage, the soldier — who was on his fourth tour after three tours in Iraq — saw a comrade’s leg blown off.

The U.S. military’s General Order No. 1 forbids “possessing, consuming, introducing, purchasing, selling, transferring, or manufacturing any alcoholic beverage” in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Soldiers found violating the order can face discharge or criminal charges.

War zone deployments have not always been so ascetic, of course. During the Vietnam era, drinking was allowed and both drinking and drug use were common among soldiers. At that time, raucous, alcohol-fueled nights out on the town in Saigon were routine.

But as men returned from Vietnam as alcoholics and drug addicts, the military started to revisit its substance abuse policy. In 1971, the government required all military branches to identify substance abusers and provide treatment and rehabilitation. More than 20 percent of soldiers tested positive for drugs when the Army started screenings, according to U.S. military figures.

Then, when the U.S. sent peacekeepers to the Balkans in the 1990s, commanders went further and banned all alcohol for the deployed troops.

Because of the risks of sneaking in alcohol, most U.S. soldiers simply get by without it during their tours in Afghanistan. They buy nonalcoholic beer in stores on base for the familiar taste. Those looking for a buzz take up smoking or chewing tobacco.

There are many more stories of U.S. soldiers on small outposts abusing prescription drugs or smoking easily available hashish. Drug abuse is a rampant problem in the Afghan army and U.S. soldiers have been known to start smoking up alongside their Afghan counterparts.

On remote, hilly outposts, soldiers often make it through the night with sleeping pills and joints get passed around. Some become addicts. Most say they’re doing what they have to, facing a morning that could bring a new firefight or a roadside bombing on their patrol.

In Iraq in 2006, a U.S. soldier stationed near Mahmoudiya raped and killed a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and killed her parents and sister. Steven Dale Green, a former 101st Airborne soldier, was sentenced to five life terms for the crime. He said in a later interview that drugs and alcohol were prevalent at his checkpoint south of Baghdad. He also said that he had been taking a mood-regulating drug to help him deal with the traumatic events he’d seen.

Green said by the time he committed the murders he had seen so much violence and so many people killed that he had stopped thinking of Iraqi civilians as humans.

“I was crazy,” Green said in 2010 telephone interview from federal prison in Tucson, Arizona. “I was just all the way out there. I didn’t think I was going to live.”

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AP National Security Writer Robert Burns in Washington contributed to this report.

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The U.S. Embassy said an Afghan employee of the complex shot dead an American citizen and wounded another before being killed.

“The motivation for the attack is still under investigation,” the embassy said in a statement.

Embassy spokesman Gavin Sundwall declined to comment on what the targeted annex was used for, citing security reasons. Sundwall said the Afghan employee was not authorized to carry a weapon, and it was not clear how the man was able to get a gun into the secured compound.

The embassy did not provide information on the American who was killed, and said the person wounded in the shooting was taken to a military hospital with injuries that were not life-threatening. It said the embassy has “resumed business operations.”

The attack came less than two weeks after militants fired rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles at the U.S. Embassy, NATO headquarters and other buildings in Kabul, killing seven Afghans. No embassy or NATO staff members were hurt in the 20-hour assault. But it plunged U.S.-Pakistan relations to new lows as U.S. officials accused Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency of supporting insurgents in planning and executing the Sept. 13 attack.

Sunday’s assault also follows closely on last week’s assassination of former Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani, who was leading a government effort to broker peace with the Taliban. He was killed when an insurgent who had claimed to be a peace emissary exploded a bomb hidden in his turban upon meeting Rabbani.

President Hamid Karzai called Rabbani’s death a “big loss” and said greater security measures should be taken to protect top Afghan figures, including religious clerics and tribal leaders. A government spokesman said that the man who brought the suicide bomber to Kabul has been arrested.

NATO bases and embassies have ramped up security following a number of attacks over the past year by Afghan security forces against their counterparts. Since March 2009, the coalition has recorded at least 20 incidents where a member of the Afghan security forces or someone wearing a uniform used by them killed coalition forces. Thirty-six coalition troops have died. It is not known how many of the 282,000 members of the Afghan security forces were killed.

In December 2009, an al-Qaida double agent blew himself up at a CIA base in eastern Khost province, killing seven CIA employees. The attacker, a Jordanian man named Humam al-Balawi, had been brought into the base because he had claimed to be able to reach high-level al-Qaida leaders.

Meanwhile, political tension between Afghanistan and Pakistan continued to mount Monday as the Afghan Foreign Ministry warned Pakistan that if artillery attacks in eastern Afghanistan continue will harm relations between the countries.

The Afghan government has said that an unknown number of Afghan civilians have been killed by the shelling coming from Pakistani territory in recent days. The attacks have allegedly destroyed several houses and mosques and displaced hundreds of people from their homes.

The Foreign Ministry quoted Mohammad Sadeq, Pakistan’s ambassador in Kabul, as saying that the attacks were not intentional and that he regretted the killings and the destruction of property. The Pakistani Embassy in Kabul could not immediately confirm the statement.

The Afghan censure comes as U.S. officials have sharpened their missives to Pakistan over the past week and half, drawing more direct lines between the government and the Haqqani network, which is affiliated with the Taliban and al-Qaida and is often blamed for attacks in Kabul.

NATO said Monday that its operations in the east in the past four months have killed more than 450 enemy fighters but that it is clear that the Haqqanis, who control large areas in the east, are still operating out of Pakistan.

“We have no credible intelligence indicating that the Haqqani network has eliminated their operating safehavens in Pakistan,” said Brigadier Gen. Carsten Jacobson, a spokesman for NATO forces in Afghanistan. “They continue to plan and execute operations from across the border.”

In the south on Monday, a NATO service member was killed in a bomb attack, making a total of 38 international troopers killed so far this month.

Associated Press writer Adam Goldman in Washington, D.C. contributed to this report.