Iran escalated its confrontation with the United States on Thursday over the captured American spy drone launched from Afghanistan, warning the Afghan government to order a halt to such surveillance flights.

Any further flights would be regarded as a hostile act, the Iranian foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, said in an interview with Iran’s official Islamic Republic News Agency. His warning threatened to drag Afghanistan directly into the dispute over American aerial surveillance of Iran.

There was no immediate response from the United States or Afghanistan to Mr. Salehi’s admonition. But Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, visiting with Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, in Kabul on Wednesday, said that surveillance flights over Iran would continue despite the loss of the drone. Mr. Karzai was more circumspect, saying Afghanistan wanted “the best of relations” with all its neighbors.

Iran has said it captured the drone — a sophisticated, batwinged RQ-170 model with radar-evading features — by way of an electronic attack on the aircraft’s navigation system as it hovered over northern Iran on Dec. 4, causing it to land without damage.