The Afghan president and the Pakistani prime minister dismissed the WikiLeaks revelations about their respective countries as alternately false, unreliable and the work of 'junior officers' in a joint news conference here on Saturday. However, a senior Afghan minister later took a more aggrieved tone, suggesting that the leaked cables had irreparably damaged relations between the U.S. ambassador, Karl W. Eikenberry, and members of the Afghan government. The minister, Omar Zakhilwal, also said that remarks attributed to him by Eikenberry in one of the cables, disparaging President Hamid Karzai, were false. Until Saturday, the Afghan government had said little about the contents of the cables, thousands of confidential State Department memos that were made public in the past week by the website WikiLeaks and a number of newspapers. The Afghan president's spokesman had said only that most of the major points had been previously disclosed and that Afghanistan and the United States had a strategic relationship. At the news conference on Saturday, Karzai and the Pakistani prime minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani, appeared to be trying to diminish the significance of the cables by throwing doubt on their authenticity while at the same time taking them seriously enough to deny some of their contents. When Gilani was asked about a cable that said his government lacked the ability to control its own military and intelligence services, he said, 'I would request you not to trust WikiLeaks.' 'These are just the views of junior officers,' he said. 'They are not authentic. We should not even take them seriously.' Karzai seemed at times statesmanlike and above the fray and at others frustrated, but overall he seemed more inclined to put the revelations behind him. He said that he understood that of course his ministers spoke about him, but that he was sure the way the cables characterized their remarks was not correct. 'Take the example of Mr. Zakhilwal,' he said. 'I am sure they are not true.' Zakhilwal, the finance minister, was reported to have called Karzai 'an extremely weak man,' comments he denied in his own news conference later on Saturday. Karzai also said that people might say things casually in private that might not reflect their more considered and accurate positions. He scorned the accuracy of another cable, about former Vice President Ahmad Zia Masood's taking $52 million in cash out of the country, saying that it was absurd to think that a vice president could arrive in another country with 30 suitcases full of cash. Furthermore, he said, the U.S. government had never spoken to him about it. 'We don't know what to do with this whole thing: Do we believe it or not believe it?' he said. 'I would go towards not believing it, that is better for Afghanistan.' In his own news conference, Zakhilwal denied having uttered the remarks about Karzai as reported in a diplomatic cable sent by Eikenberry on Feb. 26, and he suggested that the views were the ambassador's. 'I have never, ever used this word 'weak' to describe the president, never, ever,' he said. He said the accusations had destroyed any trust between him and the ambassador and would affect the ambassador's effectiveness. 'It has certainly hurt relations not only between me and him, but between some ministers and the ambassador, and it will certainly not be business as usual,' Zakhilwal said. 'The ambassador has used my name to support his views of the president,' he said. Asked if he was calling for the ambassador to resign, the minister replied, 'It is up to the ambassador.' 