KABUL (AFP) - US Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama on Sunday met here with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who has been criticised by the Illinois senator for not doing enough to rebuild his war-torn country.

An official in Karzai's office told AFP the talks had taken place in the capital, but gave no details about the meeting.

Obama has made Afghanistan a key focus of his foreign policy pledges, saying it -- not Iraq -- should be the focus of the so-called "war on terror" and promising to send more troops to battle insurgents here if elected.

He has been critical of Karzai's government, telling CNN it had "not gotten out of the bunker and helped to organise Afghanistan and (the) government, the judiciary, police forces, in ways that would give people confidence."

"So there are a lot of problems there," Obama said in an interview with CNN earlier this month.

His comments drew immediate fire from Republicans, who accused him of insulting a key US "war on terror" ally and ignoring multiple assassination attempts against Karzai.

Before his talks with Karzai, Obama and two US senators accompanying him started the day with breakfast with US troops at a US military camp in Kabul.

On Saturday they met senior military commanders at the main American base at Bagram, north of the capital, for a briefing on the international effort to quell the insurgency being fought here by the Taliban and other extremists.

The delegation later flew to a base in eastern Afghanistan, close to the border with Pakistan, where they met Afghan officials and more of the 36,000 US soldiers stationed here.

Obama has accused the Bush administration of allowing Al-Qaeda and the Taliban to regroup by diverting vital US forces to the war in Iraq.

He has said that if he wins the White House in November, he would commit at least two more combat brigades, up to 10,000 men, to Afghanistan, while downscaling the size of the force in Iraq.

"We need more troops, more helicopters, better intelligence-gathering and more non-military assistance to accomplish the mission there," Obama said in The New York Times on Monday.

"Iraq is not the central front in the war on terrorism, and it never has been."

In a radio address Saturday to coincide with Obama's visit, his Republican rival John McCain criticised the senator for announcing his strategy for Afghanistan and Iraq before his fact-finding tour.

"Apparently, he's confident enough that he won't find any facts that might change his opinion or alter his strategy -- remarkable," McCain said.

An extremist insurgency was launched in Afghanistan after the Taliban were removed from government in late 2001 in a US-led invasion.

The hardliners were attacked after they refused to hand over Al-Qaeda leaders for the 9/11 attacks that killed around 3,000 people.

The number of international troops in Afghanistan has since risen to nearly 70,000 -- about half of them US nationals.

But the unrest has grown, too, with some of the bloodiest incidents in recent months, including an attack on a remote outpost last month in which nine US soldiers were killed and 15 wounded.

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