Comments by cabinet ministers that were endorsed by President Hamid Karzai and reported by Afghan news agencies made clear that the most proximate concern for the government and especially Mr. Karzai is the negotiation of a bilateral security agreement with the United States for after 2014. The Afghan government appears to believe that there is a plot by the United States to weaken Afghanistan’s standing in order to gain leverage in the negotiations.

“The U.S., by using the press, is waging a psychological war to attain the security agreement, and the published report and views of the International Crisis Group is part of this effort, and it is fully against existing realities in the country,” said a report on the cabinet comments by the semiofficial government news service Bakhtar.

The cabinet believes that Western news and research organizations “are aiming at creating concern and distrust among the people of Afghanistan,” the Bakhtar report said.

A former spokesman for Mr. Karzai, Waheed Omar, said that many ministers believe that “the Western media is a tool of their governments’ foreign policy and that the I.C.G. is not independent and that they are depicting Afghanistan’s situation as grim so as to put the Afghan government in a position where it has to accept a security agreement that is more in America’s interest than in the interest of Afghanistan.”

The tone echoed Mr. Karzai’s news conference last week, in which he made similar accusations.

These reports in part are seen by Mr. Karzai as an affront, and that narrative has been taken up by many others in the government, Afghan and Western analysts said. It is also an expression of frustration with the West’s frequent criticism of the Afghan government.

Martine Van Bijlert, one of the directors of the Afghanistan Analysts Network, a research organization based in Kabul, said: “The reports basically say, ‘You are presiding over a country that cannot take care of itself.’ And beyond that, there is the feeling from some Afghans that, ‘We are just fed up with being told we cannot take care of ourselves and we are not accepting that anymore.’ ”

Some Afghan analysts said they thought the government was overreacting rather than taking concrete steps to try to avert the worst predictions.