There was good reason for the heightened vigilance. A week earlier, a Taliban raiding party, dressed in Afghan National Army-style uniforms and equipped with fake IDs, penetrated the first two checkpoints in the seven rings of security surrounding the palace before being gunned down in a two-hour battle. They got as far as Ariana Chowk, near C.I.A. headquarters, where, in 1996, Najibullah, the last president of the Soviet-backed government, was killed after being castrated by the victorious Taliban.

The preceding weeks were particularly bad ones for Karzai’s embattled relationship with his Taliban enemies as well as his U.S. backers. After years of postponed negotiations and hedging, Karzai, the United States and the Taliban agreed to meet in Qatar for peace talks. The Americans and Karzai believed that the Taliban would describe their Doha premises as an office. Instead, they erected an embassylike plaque at the entrance that read “the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan” and unfurled the old Taliban flag. Karzai believed that the Obama administration had secretly agreed to this, and it played on his paranoia that the United States was making secret deals with the Taliban and their Pakistani backers, hoping to break up Afghanistan and create a Taliban entity in the south of the country.

Because of all this, I anticipated meeting a careworn Karzai, coming to terms with the unraveling of his regime. Instead, on our very first evening, he bounded into the room and grasped my hand firmly. I commented how well he looked considering the stress, and he laughed: “I don’t feel under pressure,” he said. “The first days of Ramadan are completely off days — nobody comes. Today was my first totally free day in all these 10 years! I did not even leave my room.” His wife, he said, was in Belgium with the children. “I just took naps and read my newspapers.”

The nervous tic that often makes Karzai wince with his left eye, and which is said to get worse when he is upset, was almost absent. His robust health also gave the lie to the rumor that in adversity, Karzai had become addicted to various narcotics. The rumors had gained credence in Kabul’s gossip mill in part because of the president’s mood swings and fits of anger. They are nonetheless nonsense, according to those who know him well. “He’s very fit indeed,” says Amrullah Saleh, his former security chief, now a political opponent. “He takes at least an hour’s exercise each night and exhausts the guards that have to keep up with him.” Mahmood agrees: “He’s very disciplined physically. And he’s extremely moderate in his eating. You know how delicious our melons are? I’ve often seen his hand hovering over a second slice, and then he resists. He has steely discipline.” After a day of fasting, however, there was no such restraint. As Karzai munched his way through a huge platter of Afghan melons, grapes and figs, as well as mountains of tiny cherries, he merrily began denouncing what he described as the “betrayal” of Afghanistan and its people by what he referred to as his so-called Western allies.

The United States, Karzai said, was now plotting with Pakistan to abandon his regime and replace it with a divided Afghanistan, too weak to resist U.S. demands. To this end, America had long been deliberately destabilizing the region: “Has the war on terror made this region less radical or more radical?” he asked. “Is this the unintended consequence? Or has this been the result of policy?

“The picture is now becoming clear,” he continued, thumping the table for emphasis. “The West wanted to use Afghanistan, to have bases here, to create a situation whereby in the end Afghanistan would be so weak that it would agree to a deal in which Afghanistan’s interests will not even be secondary, but tertiary and worse.”

Karzai’s rhetorical flights over the years have perplexed and dismayed his allies. More recently, they were the cause of something approaching despair as negotiations over the Bilateral Security Agreement (B.S.A.), which outlines the terms of the continued American military presence, stalled. At the time of our meeting, the two sides seemed irreparably deadlocked. Karzai wanted the United States to protect Afghanistan from outside attack — even if that meant sending forces into Pakistan. The United States wanted full immunity for its troops under Afghan law and was threatening a complete pullout if its terms were not met. Karzai let it be known that if necessary, Afghanistan would forgo a U.S. alliance and seek help elsewhere. This prospect terrified Karzai’s supporters at home as much as American officials, who feared the government they had installed at such cost might quickly collapse to the Taliban.