Karl Eikenberry's memos, sent as President Obama enters the final stages of his deliberations over a new Afghanistan strategy, illustrated both the difficulty of the decision and the deepening divisions within the administration's national security team. After a top-level meeting on the issue yesterday - Obama's eighth since early last month - the White House issued a statement that appeared to reflect the concerns of Eikenberry, a retired four-star general and former U.S. commander in Afghanistan.

"The President believes that we need to make clear to the Afghan government that our commitment is not open-ended," the statement said. "After years of substantial investments by the American people, governance in Afghanistan must improve in a reasonable period of time."

On the eve of his nine-day trip to Asia, Obama was given a series of options laid out by military planners with differing numbers of new U.S. deployments, ranging from 10,000 to 40,000 troops. None of the scenarios calls for scaling back the U.S. presence in Afghanistan or delaying the dispatch of additional troops.

Obama does not plan to accept any of the war options, pushing instead for revisions to clarify how and when U.S. troops would turn over responsibility to the Afghan government, a senior administration official told the Associated Press yesterday.

Obama is still close to announcing his revamped war strategy - most likely shortly after he returns from Asia.

Eikenberry's last-minute interventions have highlighted the nagging undercurrent of the policy discussion: the U.S. dependence on a partnership with a Karzai government whose incompetence and corruption are a universal concern within the administration. After months of political upheaval, following widespread fraud in the August presidential election, Karzai was installed last week for a second five-year term.

In addition to placing the Karzai problem prominently on the table, the cables from Eikenberry, who in 2006-07 commanded U.S. troops in Afghanistan, have rankled his former colleagues in the Pentagon - as well as Gen. Stanley McChrystal, defense officials said.

McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, has stated that without the deployment of an additional tens of thousands of troops within the next year, the mission there "will likely result in failure."

Eikenberry retired from the military in April as a senior general in NATO and was sworn in as ambassador the next day. His position as a former commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan is likely to give added weight to his concerns.

Although Eikenberry's extensive military experience was one of the main reasons he was chosen by Obama for the top diplomatic job in Afghanistan, the former general had been reluctant as ambassador to weigh in on military issues. Some officials who favor an increase in troops said they were befuddled by the last-minute nature of his strongly worded cables.

In his communications with Washington, Eikenberry has expressed deep reservations about Karzai's erratic behavior and Afghan government corruption, particularly in the senior ranks of the Karzai government, said U.S. officials familiar with the cables. Since Karzai's reelection, U.S. diplomats have seen little sign that the Afghan president plans to address the problems of corruption they have raised repeatedly with him.

U.S. officials were particularly irritated by a interview this week in which a defiant Karzai said that the West had little interest in Afghanistan and that its troops were there only for their own reasons.

"The West is not here primarily for the sake of Afghanistan," Karzai told PBS's The News Hour With Jim Lehrer. "It is here to fight terrorism. The United States and its allies came to Afghanistan after Sept. 11. Afghanistan was troubled like hell before that, too. Nobody bothered about us."

The internal deliberations have been shaped in large part by the hard skepticism of Obama's civilian counselors, led by Vice President Biden, who have argued for a more narrow counterterrorism strategy that would not significantly expand the U.S. combat presence in Afghanistan.

In Afghanistan yesterday, NATO said that military divers had found the body of a U.S. paratrooper who disappeared last week along with another soldier as the two tried to retrieve air-dropped supplies from a river.

Relatives said they believe Spec. Benjamin Sherman of Plymouth, Mass., died after jumping into the river to try to save his comrade, who was also swept away by the current.