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Hamid Karzai

Hamid Karzai (24 December 1957-) was President of Afghanistan from 22 December 2001 to 29 September 2014, succeeding Burhanuddin Rabbani and preceding Ashraf Ghani. Karzai was a leader of the Northern Alliance during the Afghan Civil War, and, following the United States-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, Karzai was named as the interim leader of Afghanistan at the Bonn Conference in Germany and was re-elected in the first post-Taliban elections in 2004. Initially a staunch ally of the United States, Karzai's relationship with the USA and NATO later cooled, and his government was also accused of corruption.

Biography[]

Hamid Karzai was born in Kandahar, Afghanistan on 24 December 1957 to a Pashtun family, the nephew of diplomat Habibullah Karzai. He was educated in India before becoming a fundraiser for the Mujahideen in Pakistan during the Soviet-Afghan War of the 1980s, after which he took part in the overthrow of Mohammad Najibullah's communist regime. Karzai became Deputy Foreign Minister under President Burhanuddin Rabbani, but, after attempting to mediate between Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Rabbani during the Afghan Civil War, he was arrested by Mohammad Fahim (his future Vice President) on charges of spying for Hezb-e Islami Gulbuddin. When the Taliban emerged in the mid-1990s, Karzai initially recognized them as a legitimate government, as he believed that they would stop the violence and corruption in Afghanistan, but he turned down the Taliban's offer to serve as their ambassador because he believed that Pakistan's ISI was manipulating the Taliban. Karzai later sought to serve as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan's representative to the United Nations, but Mohammed Omar distrusted Karzai for his Western links. Karzai promptly traveled to Quetta, Pakistan to work towards the reinstatement of King Mohammed Zahir Shah, returning to his political roots as a monarchist. In July 1999, Karzai's father was assassinated by the Taliban in Quetta, leading to Karzai deciding to work with the Northern Alliance to overthrow the Taliban regime. In 2000 and 2001, he travelled to Europe and the United States to raise support for the anti-Taliban movement, and he and Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud attempted to warn the United States that the Taliban were allied to al-Qaeda, and that al-Qaeda was planning a major terrorist attack against the United States. Massoud and Karzai's advice was not heeded, resulting in the 9/11 attacks on 11 September 2001. Karzai led a band of Northern Alliance fighters in supporting the USA's invasion of Afghanistan, and he worked with American special forces to capture Kandahar from the Taliban before surviving a friendly fire airstrike at Sayyd Alma Kalay on 5 December 2001. On 5 December 2001, the international Bonn Conference formed an interim government in Afghanistan and named Karzai as its leader on 22 December. Karzai developed a chic and unifying fashion style in which he wore a Pashtun long shirt and trousers, a Tajik and Uzbek outer robe, and a lambskin karakul hat from the Panjshir highlands. In 2004, Karzai was elected President of Afghanistan in the first post-Taliban elections, with Zahir Shah and the American Vice President Dick Cheney attending his inauguration. During Karzai's first term, his government was accused of corruption and failure to provide security against the escalating Taliban insurgency, but he was re-elected in 2009 in an election marred by low voter turnout, electoral fraud, ballot stuffing, and voter intimidation. At the same time, Karzai grew increasingly distant from the United States due to the US military's partial responsibility for Afghanistan's high civilian casualties during the Afghanistan War, and, in 2014, he sided with Russia during the Crimea crisis. Karzai also stated that he saw Iran as a friend; because of Karzai's government's ties to the Iranian regime, Saudi Arabia and Qatar financed the Taliban with the objective of ousting the pro-Iranian regime. Karzai also strengthened Afghanistan's relations with India, where he had studied abroad as a youth. In 2013, he called the Taliban his "brothers" and stated that the Afghan government and the Afghan people wanted to reintegrate the Taliban into society rather than eliminate them. Karzai covertly supported the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan insurgent group in Pakistan in retaliation for Pakistan's support for the Afghan Taliban's insurgency. He left office in 2014, when Ashraf Ghani was elected President, but Karzai remained an influential figure in Afghan politics, preventing a 2015 attack on a Taliban training camp and calling Ghani a traitor after allowing the US Air Force to drop a MOAB on an ISIL base in Nangarhar Province on 13 April 2017. Karzai also claimed that ISIL was a tool of the United States (saying that he did not differentiate at all between them), claimed that the USA had made Afghanistan a testing ground for its weapons, and accused the USA of using unmarked helicopters to supply ISIL. In May 2021, in an interview with Der Spiegel, he expressed his sympathy for the Taliban as "victims of foreign forces".

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