US President Barack Obama arrived in Afghanistan late yesterday on a surprise visit a year after American elite Navy SEALs killed Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden in a raid deep inside Pakistan.

The US President, making only his third trip to Afghanistan since taking over as commander-in-chief in 2009, arrived at 10.20 p.m.

Mr Obama’s last trip in December 2010 lasted only a few hours when he flew into Bagram air base, outside Kabul, to meet US troops but he did not meet with Mr Karzai.

Ties between Kabul and Washington have strained since last May amid a series of bloody massacres and incidents by US troops against Afghan civilians as a 130,000-strong US-led Nato force fights a fierce Taliban insurgency.

The last of the remaining 87,000 American troops in the country are due to pull out by the end of 2014, some 13 years after a US-led campaign in late 2001 to oust the Taliban Islamic regime accused of harbouring bin Laden.

Relations between Pakistan and the US also plunged over the May 2, 2011 raid that killed bin Laden, tracked down to a compound in the Pakistani military town of Abbottabad after a decade-long global manhunt. Mr Obama’s top counter-terrorism aide, John Brennan, on Monday argued Al-Qaeda was losing “badly” amid a US drone campaign in the Pakistan-Afghanistan region, and that its core leadership would soon be “no longer relevant.”

The campaign had left the terror groups seriously weakened, and unable to replace wiped-out leaders, he said. Bin Laden had also been frustrated by the demise of his group, which was behind the September 11, 2001 attacks against the United States, and vented his anger in documents seized from his compound by the SEAL commandos.

“He confessed to ‘disaster after disaster’” for Al-Qaeda, Mr Brennan said.