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KABUL : US Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama was due to hold talks with President Hamid Karzai in Kabul Sunday, the Afghan government said, on the second day of a visit to the insurgency-hit country.
It was not clear what time Obama would meet Karzai since details of trips to Afghanistan by prominent personalities are often kept secret for security purposes.
Obama and other US senators arrived in Afghanistan on Saturday and met US military commanders at the main American base at Bagram, north of Kabul, for a briefing on the international effort against the Taliban and other extremists.
The delegation later flew to a base in eastern Afghanistan, closer to the border with Pakistan, where they met some of the 36,000 US soldiers in Afghanistan, the US-led coalition said in a statement.
The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee has been critical of Karzai's government, saying in an interview with CNN this month that it had not "gotten out of the bunker" to rebuild the war-torn country.
Obama's comments drew immediate fire from Republicans, who accused him of insulting a key US "war on terror" ally and ignoring multiple assassination attempts against Karzai.
"I think the Karzai government has not gotten out of the bunker and helped to organise Afghanistan and (the) government, the judiciary, police forces, in ways that would give people confidence," Obama said. "So there are a lot of problems there."
The Illinois senator has also accused the Bush administration of allowing Al-Qaeda and the Taliban to regroup by diverting vital US forces to the war in Iraq.
He has said that if he wins the US election in November, he would commit at least two more combat brigades, up to 10,000 men, to Afghanistan, while downscaling the size of the force in Iraq.
"We need more troops, more helicopters, better intelligence-gathering and more non-military assistance to accomplish the mission there," Obama said in The New York Times on Monday.
"Iraq is not the central front in the war on terrorism, and it never has been."
In a radio address Saturday to coincide with Obama's visit, his Republican rival John McCain criticised the senator for announcing his strategy for Afghanistan and Iraq before his fact-finding tour.
"Apparently, he's confident enough that he won't find any facts that might change his opinion or alter his strategy -- remarkable," McCain said.
An extremist insurgency was launched in Afghanistan after the Taliban were removed from government in late 2001 in a US-led invasion.
The hardliners were attacked after they refused to hand over Al-Qaeda leaders for the 9/11 attacks that killed around 3,000 people in Washington and New York.
The number of international troops in Afghanistan has since risen to nearly 70,000 -- about half of them US nationals.
But the unrest has grown, too, with some of the bloodiest incidents in recent months including an attack on a remote outpost last month in which nine US soldiers were killed and 15 wounded.
- AFP/vm
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