The US Defence Secretary was due to meet with his Afghan counterpart, but hours before Mattis touched down in Kabul, Ghani announced that his Defense Minister and Army Chief of Staff had resigned with immediate effect.
On Friday, as many as a dozen Taliban militants stormed the largest army base in northern Afghanistan, killing at least 140 soldiers, many of them unarmed.
The Afghan minister of defense and the army chief of staff both resigned on Monday as the government faced mounting pressure over a Taliban sneak attack that killed more than 160 soldiers last week.
Ghani traveled to the base in Balkh on Saturday from where he strongly condemned the attack, according to a tweet from the official Twitter account of the presidential palace.
Seven CIA officers were killed by a Jordanian double-agent at the base in a 2010 suicide attack.
US officials say that Nicholson's request was making its way through the chain of command.
A spokesman for the Afghan Ministry of the Interior said the auto bomb was detonated near the Campaign military camp in Khost on Monday, Afghanistan's Khaama Press reported.
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President Ashraf Ghani accepted the resignations, according to a statement from the president's office.
Meanwhile, Mattis, making his first visit to Afghanistan as Pentagon chief, was due to meet top officials including President Ashraf Ghani less than two weeks after the U.S. dropped its largest non-nuclear bomb on ISIS hideouts in the country's east.
This comes in the wake of two major attacks against military installations in the past few week, including Friday's incident. Washington is looking to work out a strategy for its further role in the country under President Donald Trump's administration.
The Defense Ministry said that more than 100 military personnel were killed or injured in the attack, but officials in Kabul told RFE/RL that more than 130 had been killed. "In keeping secretary's intent, they will be annihilated", said Nicholson, who noted that ISIS attempts to gain a foothold in the country have been mostly repelled.
Lawmakers in the upper house of parliament also questioned U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation forces to confine their anti-terrorist operations against the Islamic State (IS) and allow the Taliban to carry out more deadly attacks.
On April 13, the United States military dropped America's most powerful non-nuclear bomb on ISIS targets in Afghanistan, killing 94 ISIS fighters.
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