United States President, Barack Obama, landed in Kabul, unannounced and delivered a live televised address to mark the first anniversary of the killing of Osama Bin Laden.

At Bagram air base, Obama met troops and in his live address to US people declared: ‘One year ago from a base here in Afghanistan, our troops launched the operation that killed Osama bin Laden. The goal that I set to defeat Al Qaeda and deny it a chance to rebuild is now within our reach.'

He has also indicated that there would be a US presence in the country until 2024. His previous public position has always been that troops would be out of the country by a 2014.

Insisting that ‘we have a clear path to fulfill our mission in Afghanistan’, he said that Afghans would be responsible for their own security after 2014 but ‘two narrow security missions’ of ‘counterterrorism and continued training’ would still be carried out by Americans troops.

Obamas’s six hour visit to Afghanistan under cover of darkness came as Republicans lambasted Obama for politicizing the operation to take out the al Qaeda leader and serving and former US Navy SEALs blasted him for using their comrades as ‘ammunition’ in his election campaign against Mitt Romney.

‘Similarly, this trip to Afghanistan is an attempt to shore up his national security credentials, because he has spent the past three years gutting our military.’

Sources from the White House said that the visit was to sign a strategic partnership agreement with Afghanistan meant to mark the beginning of the end of a war that has lasted for more than a decade.

Obama was not permitted to be on the ground in daylight because of the dangerous situation present in Afghanistan.

Air Force One landed at the Bagram base just north of Kabul and Obama was then flown by helicopter to President Hamid Karzai’s palace in the Afghan capital where the two leaders signed the partnership pact.

Obama then met troops before delivering a speech aimed almost exclusively at the American domestic audience.

Republicans had heaped criticism on Obama before he landed in Afghanistan. Michael Mukasey, attorney general under Bush, slammed Obama for his “plans during the coming campaign to exploit the bragging rights to the achievement” in an article in the Wall Street Journal.

Mukasey highlghted ‘the way (Obama)emphasised his own role in the hazardous mission accomplished by SEAL Team 6’ and contrasted with Bush’s praise of American troops when Saddam Hussein was captured in 2003.

Donald Rumseld, Bush's Pentagon chief from 2001 to 2006, said via twitter that the professionalism of the SEALs over the bin Laden raid was in contrast to Obama's approach: 'The special operators who have every right to "spike the football" are too professional to do so. The White House might follow their lead.'

Jose Rodriguez, a former head of the CIA’s Clandestine Service, wrote in the ‘Washington Post’ that Obama had made the right decision to order the killing of bin Laden. (msn)