As President Barack Obama prepares to announce the scale of the US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, one headache for Washington policy makers has been the increasingly incendiary and downright hostile statements coming from Afghan President Hamid Karzai. His latest attack came Saturday: You remember a few years ago I was saying thank you to the foreigners for their help; every minute we were thanking them. Now I have stopped saying that... Theyre here for their own purposes, for their own goals, and theyre using our soil for that. Even as Karzais rhetoric has turned sharply anti-Western and anti-American, its not clear he actually wants foreign troops to withdraw, a step that could endanger his govts stability. Still, his language has frustrated US officials, who feel that he is undermining the war effort. At the point your leaders believe that we are doing more harm than good, when we reach a point that we feel our soldiers and civilians are being asked to sacrifice without a just cause, and our generous aid programs dismissed as totally ineffective and the source of all corruption, outgoing US Ambassador to Kabul Karl Eichenberry said, in response to Karzais latest verbal barrage. The American people will ask for our forces to come home. So whats behind Karzais anger? A chorus of officials and analysts think he has simply become unhinged - US intelligence reports have reportedly voiced the theory that he is manic-depressive. But others believe that Karzai is calculating that anti-American statements will burnish his nationalist credentials and curry favor with the Afghan population. Still, Karzai is running the risk of undercutting support for the military intervention that is crucial for him to fend off the insurgency. Polls indicate that Americans are losing patience with the Afghan war. And when Afghanistans leader vociferously condemns American soldiers as occupiers, their impatience only grows. Hes systematically been creating the impression that we are wasting our time over there, Nasr said. Below, Foreign Policy compiled some of Karzais most notorious recent statements. In perhaps his most infamous quote - made in April 2010 at a closed door meeting, and reported second hand - Karzai threatened to quit the political reconciliation process and join the insurgency. The remark came in response to parliamentary refusal to back a proposal he favoured, which he reportedly blamed on foreign conspiracy. One parliamentarian in the room relayed the quote to the Associated Press: He said that if I come under foreign pressure, I might join the Taliban. Some lawmakers said it showed Karzai was trying to pander to a hard-line, pro-Taliban block in parliament. At a news conference in May, Karzai issued a last warning to NATO that it must stop airstrikes responsible for the deaths of civilians: If they continue their attacks on our houses, then their presence will change from a force that is fighting against terrorism to a force that is fighting against Afghanistans. And in that case, history shows what Afghans do with trespassers and with occupiers. American officials were irked by the implicit comparison to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and by the fact that Karzai made little reference to the insurgent groups responsible for the vast majority of civilian deaths. According to United Nation figures, NATO forces were responsible for only about 16 percent of the 2,777 civilians who died due to conflict-related causes last year. In March, during an emotional speech to relatives of civilians killed in the fighting, Karzai said NATO should stop its operations altogether in Afghanistan. With great honor and with great respect, and humbly rather than with arrogance, I request that NATO and America should stop these operations on our soil. If the war is against terror, then this war is not here, terror is not here...our demand is that this war should be stopped. Karzai later backed away somewhat from his demand, as a spokesman clarified that his comments only referred to Get rid of the international reconstruction teams Karzai called in February for the removal of provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs) - small groups staffed by civilians from the United States and other NATO countries - which manage large-scale aid and development projects around Afghanistan. Karzais gripe was that that the funds disbursed by the PRTs dont flow through his government, according to the New York Times, a step US and NATO officials are leary of taking due to widespread reports of corruption within his government. We seriously and insistently want them to be removed. I hope the international community would deal with us from Afghanistans point of view, not from the point of view of their own national interest. Foreign Policy