Hamid Karzai
Hamid Karzai was president of Afghanistan from December 2001, when the Bonn conference of Afghan factions under UN chairmanship made him head of the interim administration two weeks after the Taliban fell, to September 2014, when he handed over to Ghani in the country's first peaceful transfer. In thirteen years the Pashtun chief in the green-and-purple chapan and the karakul hat was the West's Afghan. He was elected by the loya jirga in 2002, by the people in 2004 with fifty-five per cent and in 2009 in a vote so fraudulent that a million of his ballots were thrown out and his opponent withdrew from the run-off. He governed a state that the foreign money built and the foreign armies held. There was a cabinet of warlords, a brother who ran Kandahar and was said to run its opium and was shot by his own bodyguard in 2011, and the Kabul Bank that collapsed in 2010 with nine hundred million dollars lent to its own shareholders. There were the night raids and air strikes that killed villagers and that he denounced with a rising fury, calling the Americans occupiers and refusing in his last year to sign the security agreement that would have kept them, which Ghani signed on his first day. He was born in Karz outside Kandahar in 1957 into the Popalzai clan whose chiefs his family had been, studied political science at Himachal Pradesh University in India, worked for the mujahideen in Peshawar in the 1980s, was a deputy foreign minister in the mujahideen government of 1992-94, supported the Taliban at first and broke with them. In 1999 he saw his father shot dead in Quetta by their gunmen. In October 2001 he rode into Uruzgan on a motorcycle with a handful of men and a satellite phone to raise the Pashtun south against the Taliban, and was nearly killed by an American bomb dropped short in December. He was chosen at Bonn the same week. The country he left had a constitution, elections, eight million children in school, a third of them girls, roads, telephones and a currency, and a Taliban insurgency that held the countryside and a government that could not pay for itself. He opposed the surge and the withdrawal alike, and kept a channel to the Taliban through the tribes. He stayed in Kabul when they took it in August 2021, meeting their leaders and calling for an inclusive government that has not come. He lives in Kabul under their watch, one of the few of the republic's men who did not leave. He says the last twenty years were not a failure, which is a minority view.
- Lived: 1957 CE – ?
- Nationality: Afghan
- Roles: president, politician
