US fighters screamed through the sky before his plane touched down at the Soviet-era Bagram base, guarded by US and British troops who secured it shortly after Northern Alliance forces drove the Taliban out of the capital last month.
Karzai told Rumsfeld the Afghan people were thankful for America's help in battling terrorism and the Taliban.
"We were incapacitated earlier to deal with so many things at once in the country. You came on board and provided help for us -- provided the opportunity that we wanted," he said.
The 69-year-old Rumsfeld said earlier that US planes had dropped more than 200 bombs on Tora Bora over the weekend.
"There was one instance where the explosion -- the plume -- has gone 2km into the air. That is to say what they hit in the caves and the tunnels was so filled with ordnance and they hit it so successfully that the smoke and the plume covered over 2km.
Yesterday, B-52 bombers again raced through the skies on the first day of the Id al-Fitr festival marking the end of the fasting month of Ramadan, dropping bombs on suspected al-Qaeda positions through the night and into the morning.
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