KABUL, Afghanistan — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton ate breakfast with soldiers from New York and Indiana at the main American base in Afghanistan yesterday before meeting with the top American general in Afghanistan and Afghan President Hamid Karzai, officials said.

Mrs. Clinton came from Iraq with Rep. John McHugh from New York and Senator Evan Bayh from Indiana. All three are members of armed services committees.

Their meetings in Kabul were closed, and Mrs. Clinton and her colleagues did not talk with journalists.

On Friday, Mrs. Clinton said she was hearing “increasingly troubling reports out of Afghanistan” and would be searching for “accurate information about the true state of affairs” militarily and politically on her trip.

The Taliban last year launched a record number of attacks, and some 4,000 people, most of them militants, died in insurgency-related violence, according to a tally by The Associated Press based on reports from Afghan, NATO, and coalition officials. It was Afghanistan’s bloodiest year since the Taliban was ousted by an American-led coalition in late 2001.

Some 23,000 American soldiers are in Afghanistan, about half under NATO command and half under control of the American-led coalition. Mrs. Clinton has said she wants to see more troops sent to Afghanistan, without saying how many.

General Karl Eikenberry, the American commander in Afghanistan, gave Mrs. Clinton and her colleagues an update on the security situation, including the pace of reconstruction and the progress of Afghan army and police training, an American military spokesman, Colonel Tom Collins, said.

Mr. Collins said all the meetings were private and he didn’t have any information about whether troop strength was discussed.

The delegation’s trip to Kabul came a day after a visit to Iraq, where Mrs. Clinton expressed doubt that Iraq’s government would follow through with its promises to secure Baghdad as she met with top Iraqi officials and American commanders there.

After leaving Kabul, Mrs. Clinton went to Lahore, Pakistan, where an official said she met with the Pakistani president, General Pervez Musharraf, who is a key ally in the American war against terrorist groups.

No details of the meeting were available, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to reporters. No government spokesman was immediately available.

In Afghan violence, a suicide bomber blew himself up yesterday near a convoy of foreign construction workers and Afghan soldiers in southern Afghanistan, wounding one civilian, a police official, Mohammmad Asif, said.

Mr. Asif said the foreigners and Afghan troops were in their vehicles south of Qalat, capital of Zabul province, near the site where the workers are putting up a building for Afghan security forces. He could not give the workers’ nationality or the name of their company.

On Saturday, British marines staged a pre-dawn attack on a mud-brick compound atop a barren hill where insurgents were thought hiding, setting off a battle that killed 16 suspected militants and one marine in the southern province of Helmand.

The marines were supported by Dutch and British attack helicopters that fired missiles into the compound near the village of Khak-e-Hajannam. American warplanes dropped 500-pound bombs.