Afghan President Hamid Karzai

Their name conjures up the most celebrated moment of America's post-Sept. 11 military campaigns. Now the Navy SEALs belong to a grimmer chapter in history: the most deadly incident for U.S. forces in the 10-year Afghanistan war. Three months after they killed Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in neighboring Pakistan and cemented their place in military legend, the SEALs suffered a devastating loss when nearly two dozen of the elite troops were among...

KABUL, Afghanistan - Afghan President Hamid Karzai, perhaps best known in the West for periodic well-aimed jabs at his NATO allies, is embarking on a determined charm offensive as he faces the prospect of seeing troops and, perhaps even more crucially, dollars slip away from his country. The Afghan government has long regarded the NATO alliance and its partners as a seemingly bottomless source of funding. But aides to Karzai say the president is heading to a landmark NATO summit in Chicago this weekend with a keen awareness of the financial pinch being felt from London to Tokyo.

KABUL, Afghanistan - Afghan President Hamid Karzai, perhaps best known in the West for periodic well-aimed jabs at his NATO allies, is embarking on a determined charm offensive as he faces the prospect of seeing troops and, perhaps even more crucially, dollars slip away from his country. The Afghan government has long regarded the NATO alliance and its partners as a seemingly bottomless source of funding. But aides to Karzai say the president is heading to a landmark NATO summit in Chicago this weekend with a keen awareness of the financial pinch being felt from London to Tokyo.

On the heels of President Obama's surprise visit to Afghanistan last week, in which he pledged to "finish the job we started" and "end this war responsibly," the American public's support for the 11-year conflict has reached a new low, according to a poll. Just 27% of respondents said they back the U.S. military effort in Afghanistan, the new Associated Press-Gfk poll found. Of the 66% who said they oppose the war, about half said they believe the presence of American troops in Afghanistan is doing more harm than good.

Watching the Obama administration make nice with Afghan President Hamid Karzai after a bruising fight last month is a little like watching a friend return to a bad marriage with an unreliable spouse. You listen to all the reasons why staying together makes sense — the kids, commitment, money. Or in this case, commitment, stability and a common enemy. You see the logic, the lack of alternatives. You hope for the best, but worry it won't end well between them. U.S. relations with Karzai have been strained (to put it diplomatically)

President Obama signaled Wednesday that despite his earlier hesitation he may embrace a plan by his counterpart from Afghanistan to reconcile with certain Taliban leaders in hopes of uniting the country and ending a conflict that has stretched nearly nine years. Obama and Afghan President Hamid Karzai, speaking to reporters at a joint White House news conference, downplayed grievances that had flared into public view in recent months. "With respect to perceived tensions between the U.S. government and the Afghan government, let me begin by saying a lot of them were simply overstated," Obama said in the East Room of the White House, with Karzai standing to his right in a purple and green striped robe.

With a high-profile political visit and a promise of more aid, India moved Thursday to cement its ties with the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai — overtures that are all but certain to raise hackles in Pakistan, which has long sought to limit Indian influence here. At a time when the regional balance of power has been roiled by the killing of Osama bin Laden in his Pakistani hideaway by U.S. forces, India's visiting Prime Minister Manmohan Singh also lent support to the Karzai government's efforts to strike a peace deal with the Taliban, the Islamist movement that Pakistan helped create and nurture.

President Hamid Karzai on Monday promised to clean up scandal-plagued Kabul Bank but sharply criticized international auditors and oversight bodies, saying they are partly to blame for the massive malfeasance at Afghanistan's biggest private financial institution. The Afghan leader has been under intense foreign pressure to help resolve the crisis at the bank, which was driven to the brink of collapse last year after hundreds of millions of dollars in bad loans came to light. Loan recipients included some members of Karzai's inner circle.

President Obama made a brief, unannounced visit Friday to Afghanistan. But in a scenario that seemed symbolic of star-crossed U.S. relations with the administration of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, the two leaders were unable to meet face to face. The U.S. president visited American troops at Bagram airfield, a sprawling base north of Kabul. But a massive dust storm prevented him from making the short helicopter trip to meet with Karzai at his presidential palace in the capital, as the two men had planned.

Former Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani was killed by a suicide bomber on Tuesday in his home in the capital, the latest in a series of high-profile assassinations to rock the country in recent months. Rabbani was the head of a government panel set up last year to try to begin negotiations with the Taliban, and his death was seen as a serious blow to those still-nascent efforts. The bomber, who apparently had explosives concealed in his turban, entered Rabbani's home in an upscale Kabul neighborhood on the pretext of visiting him, said Gen. Mohammed Zaher, the head of criminal investigation for the Kabul police.

WASHINGTON — Osama bin Laden was devising a strategy for overthrowing Afghan President Hamid Karzai and controlling Afghanistan once the U.S. left the country, said a former U.S. official familiar with the cache of notes and letters that were seized last year in the raid on the terrorist leader's compound. Bin Laden had discussed his plans with the Taliban leadership council, known as the Quetta Shura, and the Haqqani network, which controls the North Waziristan tribal area in Pakistan, said the former official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity while discussing the intelligence.

BRUSSELS - The United States and its allies are promising to provide more than $4 billion a year for Afghanistan's army and police after international forces depart in 2 1/2 years, but they still lack firm financial pledges to meet the target, U.S. officials said. As a result, Afghan officials fear that they won't have the resources necessary to fight what is expected to be a still-virulent insurgency after most foreign troops withdraw by the end of 2014. The escalating financial crisis in Europe and uncertainty about how long Afghanistan's cash-strapped government will need major military aid are making it difficult to nail down contributions, U.S. officials acknowledged.

Leading Republican presidential contenders Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum bobbed and weaved in TV interviews Sunday over the future of U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan, blaming President Obama for worsening conditions there but refusing to say whether they would speed up the American withdrawal. Romney, appearing on "Fox News Sunday," declined repeated entreaties to say that he would escalate the current U.S. role in the NATO force, or alternately, pull out faster than Obama's 2014 withdrawal deadline, as a third GOP candidate, Newt Gingrich, has suggested.

The killing of 16 civilians in Afghanistan, allegedly by a lone U.S. serviceman, is one more blow to President Obama's hopes for an easy exit from a 10-year-old war and deepens doubts about U.S. plans to assign advisors to Afghan forces. The gruesome predawn attack showed how horrific and unforeseen events in Afghanistan, not timetables and plans at the White House and Pentagon, are setting the endgame for America's involvement in a deeply unpopular war. Washington had hoped for a carefully managed withdrawal starting this year, with 20,000 U.S. troops due home by September.

On a day when President Obama personally apologized for the burning of Korans at an American-run military base, violence over the incident escalated ominously with the killing of two American troops by an Afghan army soldier during a demonstration in eastern Afghanistan. At least 13 people have been reported killed in unrest that broke out after Afghan laborers at the Bagram air base discovered late Monday that discarded Korans were being disposed of in the incinerator used to burn trash.

  On the face of it, President Hamid Karzai has every motive to do all he can to bring about talks with the Taliban. Instead, the Afghan leader is emerging as a prime impediment to urgent U.S. efforts to jump-start negotiations with the insurgents. Since the start of his second term in office, Karzai has repeatedly declared that his top priority is finding a political settlement to the bloody Afghan conflict and bringing the "disaffected brothers" back into the social and political fold.

As U.S. commanders prepare to bring home 10,000 troops from Afghanistan by year's end, the drawdown is calling fresh attention to the tangle of woes confronting the administration of Afghan President Hamid Karzai. For much of his second term, which got off to an acrimonious start in 2009 with a fraud-tainted election, the Afghan leader has seemingly lurched from one crisis to the next. But recent weeks have seen an unusual convergence of complex and, in some cases, long-festering problems.

The Taliban's on-again, off-again approach to negotiations on a political settlement appears to be on again. Or so it seems from the announcement that it will open an office in Qatar to have a secure "address" (this seems to be the prevailing diplomatic term of art) from which it can participate in talks. Even those optimistic about the prospects for a deal robust enough to actually end the war in Afghanistan are treading warily, lacing prognostications with caveats. And rightly so in light of what has happened in the past.

A U.S. general responsible for training Afghanistan's security forces has been relieved of his duties for criticizing Afghan President Hamid Karzai and saying the country's leaders were "isolated from reality. " Maj. Gen. Peter Fuller, deputy commander of NATO's training mission in Afghanistan, made the comments in an interview posted Thursday on the website Politico. A day later, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John Allen, released a statement saying Fuller had been relieved of his assignment.