Photo: AFP

As has become customary under both President Obama and former President George W. Bush, the trip to Afghanistan has always been carried out in clandestine fashion.
Obama slipped out of the White House without notice on December 2 after presiding over a Hanukkah celebration. Air Force One took-off in secret from Andrews Air Force Base with a small pool of journalists on condition that they not report on the trip until the president landed in Afghanistan.
He swept into dark and windy Afghanistan on December 3 for a surprise holiday season visit with troops as the nine-year American-led war heads into a new phase intended to finally begin transferring control of the country to Afghan forces.
Wrapped in a tight cocoon of secrecy and security, Obama landed at Bagram Air Base, north of Kabul, on a pitch-black evening and told thousands of American service members who greeted him that they had begun to turn the tide in a war that has frustrated commanders and soldiers alike for nearly a decade.
The trip was Obama's second to Afghanistan since he became commander-in-chief. He also visited Afghanistan in 2008 as a presidential candidate.
Many White House officials, and most of the Afghan government, were not informed. Aides said that Karzai's government was informed during the last few days.
Obama's trip was the third time he had left the United States in the month since his party suffered major losses in midterm elections. He left Washington at a very busy moment, as he struggles with Congress over a host of issues like tax cuts, deficit spending, arms control, gays in the military and immigration.
Already tense relations with Karzai have been worsened in recent days by leaked U.S. diplomatic cables portraying the Afghan leader as a weak and paranoid figure at the helm of a government riddled by corruption.
While the broad outlines of this diplomatic depiction came as little surprise, the timing of the leak was awkward, coming only days before the White House was expected to complete a major review of the state of the nearly decade-old U.S. military presence in Afghanistan.
This has been the war's most lethal year for U.S. forces, and Obama faces intense political pressure to justify the long and costly conflict -- a task made more difficult by his own envoy's scathing assessment of Karzai. American criticism of the Afghan president has been widely reported, but the damning details in the leaked documents laid bare a relationship beset by mutual mistrust.
Afghanistan's weather confounded the president's plans, just as it has foreign forces over the centuries. Its notoriously gusty winds whipped around him at 45 m.p.h. and dust clouds limited visibility, grounding the helicopter that was to take him to Kabul to meet with President Hamid Karzai. He did, however, speak to Karzai for 15 minutes via secure videoconference. The two men had met before on the sidelines of a North Atlantic Treaty Organisation summit in Lisbon on November 19-20.
"Obviously it would be nice to be able to share a meal together, but at the same time they were able to be face-to-face less than two weeks ago," Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser, told reporters traveling with the president. "I think President Karzai understood the purpose of this was really for the president to spend time with the troops," he said.
The president praised the troops for what he characterised as recent military gains in the nine-year conflict. Our coalition "is strong and is growing," he said. "You're going on the offense (we're) tired of playing defense."
Obama visited a hospital on the base, where he met with five wounded soldiers and three wounded civilian contractors, reporters traveling with the president said.
He awarded five Purple Hearts and met with the surviving members of a platoon that lost six members earlier in the week. The atmosphere appeared more subdued than in past presidential visits. As Obama noted that "many of you have stood before the solemn battle cross, display of boots, a rifle, a helmet and said goodbye to a fallen soldier."
The president later huddled with National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, and Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan.
It was unclear whether U.S. concerns with the Karzai government publicised this week by the website WikiLeaks were discussed. Two of the cables paint an unflattering portrait of President Karzai's half brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, who has been accused of dealing in drugs.
Prior to the latest WikiLeaks disclosures, Petraeus met with the Afghan president in an effort to ease tensions. Karzai had told the Washington Post that he would like to scale back the U.S. military presence in his nation, and criticised it as "intrusive" while calling Special Operations raids a problem. In response, Petraeus told Karzai aides that the president's view could make his relationship with the United States "untenable."
Obama's remarks offered a more positive assessment of the situation on the ground than he has in some time, influenced perhaps by the optimism expressed in recent weeks by his commanding general, Gen. David H. Petraeus. American military forces have tripled, to 100,000, on Obama's watch, and he has vowed to begin reducing the number of troops next July.
But others in Washington and Kabul have been more sceptical of the claims of progress, noting the unabated and pervasive corruption of Karzai's government, the resilience of the insurgency despite escalated attacks and the debacle of recent peace talks that turned out to be held not with a senior Taliban leader but an impostor.

Barrister Harun ur Rashid is a former Bangladesh Ambassador to the UN, Geneva.