Within hours of Hagel’s landing in Afghanistan, two suicide bombings killed nearly 20 Afghans. One was just outside the Ministry of Defense in Kabul, where 10 people died. Karzai used a televised speech to suggest that the bombings were part of a broader conspiracy to cast his government as powerless in the face of a Taliban offensive without the continued presence of US-led troops. “Those bombs that went off in Kabul and Khost were not a show of force to America,” he continued. “They were in service of America. It was in the service of the 2014 slogan to warn us if they (US troops) are not here, then Taliban will come. In fact those bombs, set off yesterday in the name of the Taliban, were in the service of Americans to keep foreigners longer in Afghanistan.”

The Afghan president, who came to power in 2001 with American backing, went on to charge that US officials are meeting with Taliban representatives “every day” in Qatar.

The remarks drew a sharp response from the top US commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Joseph Dunford. “We have fought too hard over the past 12 years, we have shed too much blood over the last 12 years, to ever think that violence or instability would be to our advantage,” he said.

Hagel was somewhat more diplomatic. “I told the President that it was not true,” the new Pentagon chief told the media. “The fact is any prospect for peace or political settlements—that has to be led by the Afghans.” Suggesting that Karzai’s remarks were aimed at constituencies within Afghanistan, Hagel added, “I was a politician once, so I can understand the kind of pressures” he (Karzai) faces.

The “pressures” Karzai is facing are indeed intense. Both he and the his close aides are growing increasingly anxious about their ability to survive, both politically and physically, the drawdown of US troops, whose number has fallen from over 100,000 to 66,000.

This force is supposed to be cut in half by next year and reduced further by the end of 2014 to a residual force that the US wants to keep permanently deployed in Afghanistan. Last week, Gen. James Mattis, the chief of the Pentagon’s Central Command, told a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee that this force should include 20,000 troops, 13,600 of them Americans and the rest from other NATO countries.

While the US media generally treated Karzai’s comments as “bizarre”, an editorial in the Afghan daily Sarnawesht charged that the actions of US-led troops “not only do not weaken but they, in fact, strengthen insurgents.” It added that the US “repeatedly violates the Afghan government’s decisions and is treating Afghanistan as an occupied country.” The result, the editorial said, was to weaken the Afghan regime and cause Afghans to regard it “as a puppet and slave government,” and the insurgency as legitimate.

The paper referred to two prominent cases in which Washington has ridden roughshod over the Karzai regime’s demand for respect of Afghan sovereignty. The first is the long-delayed transfer of full control of the infamous US-run Bagram prison. The other issue was Karzai’s demand that US Special Operations troops be withdrawn from Wardak province, where his government charged that they had engaged in “torturing and even murdering innocent people” and had been involved in the forced disappearance of civilians.