"Air bombardments in the villages of Afghanistan will only end up killing civilians and will not be effective in the fight against terrorism," the Afghan presidential palace quoted Karzai as saying.
The comments came after a US-led strike on a convoy of vehicles carrying election campaigners killed ten civilians and wounded three in the Rustaq district of the northeastern province of Takhar.
The victims were working for a candidate in Afghanistan's September 18 parliamentary elections, Karzai said in a press conference with the US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan General David Petraeus on Thursday.
"The nature of the operation and the presence of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan's personalities or activists have to be determined. But we do know that the parliamentary candidate is wounded and 10 were killed," the Afghan president said.
Gates, however, denied that civilians had been killed in the attack saying, "This is the first that I had heard that civilians may have been killed and we will certainly look into that."
Civilian casualties caused by foreign forces have been a major source of tension between Kabul and Washington.
US-led forces have been responsible for a fifth of civilian casualties this year, with most of the rest of the 1,300 deaths caused by militants, according to UN figures.
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