President Barack Obama secretly slipped into Afghanistan under the cover of darkness on Sunday for a weekend visit with US troops serving in the closing months of America’s longest war.
Air Force One landed at Bagram Air Field, the main US base in Afghanistan.
Obama was scheduled to spend just a few hours on the base and had no plans to travel to Kabul, the capital, to meet with Hamid Karzai, the mercurial president who has had a tumultuous relationship with the White House.
Obama’s surprise trip comes as the US and NATO withdraw most of their forces ahead of a year-end deadline. He wants to keep a small number of US troops in Afghan beyond 2014 to train Afghan security forces But that plan is contingent on Karzai’s successor signing a bilateral security agreement that Karzai has refused.