Kabul - Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic party candidate for president of the United States, met President Hamed Karzai at Kabul's presidential palace, an Afghan official said Sunday. Karzai's spokesman, Siamac Herawi, said the two political leaders met at the presidential palace talks, and lunch followed by a press conference.
Obama arrived in Afghanistan Saturday on a week-long international tour that is also expected to take him to Israel, Jordan and possibly Iraq before flying on to European capitals Berlin, London and Paris.
Obama, who wants to make Afghanistan a focus of US foreign policy in terms of the "war on terror," was expected to meet US military commanders and high-ranking Afghan officials.
His trip - details of which were kept strictly under wraps until his reported arrival at Bagram US airbase north of Kabul - is seen as an attempt to improve in the eyes of US voters Obama's perceived lack of foreign affairs experience.
CNN reported that Obama had already begun the trip on Thursday with a brief stopover in Kuwait as part of a US Congress delegation, during which he had met US troops.
Al-Jazeera broadcaster said Obama, once in Afghanistan, had flown on from Bagram to visit troops in eastern Afghanistan - an area which recently saw nine US soldiers killed in an attack by the Islamic extremist Taliban, one of the heaviest losses US forces have suffered in Afghanistan.
