Yet even as the discussion has heated and cooled, officials in Kabul and Washington have repeatedly stressed that both sides want a deal and a post-2014 troop presence, even if no one can yet say what it would look like.

Mr. Karzai offered a glimpse of his thinking in his speech on Thursday at Kabul University, saying he was ready to agree to American bases in Kabul and Kandahar, the country’s two biggest cities, and at Bagram, north of Kabul, the current site of one of the largest coalition bases in Afghanistan.

He also said the United States wanted two bases in Herat Province, which borders Iran, and others in the north, east and south of Afghanistan.

At the same time, Mr. Karzai said he wanted more clarity from Western countries and from NATO as a whole about what they planned to contribute to Afghanistan after next year.

So far, Germany, which has more than 4,000 soldiers in Afghanistan, is the only major NATO member to have made a firm offer of troops after 2014. It said last month that it was prepared to keep 600 to 800 soldiers here until 2017 to train Afghan forces.

“At first, they said that they are all leaving in 2014, and now every one of them is coming one by one and saying, ‘We are not leaving,’ ” Mr. Karzai said.

“We know that they are not leaving, and so we are insisting that we have our own words with them,” he said, adding that he wanted an overall agreement with NATO in addition to any agreements with individual countries.