A rchive Date
[ 20-02-2005 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Afghanistan ]
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[http://cbc.ca/cgi-bin/templates/view.cgi?category=Canada&story=/news/2002/02/16/moscow_reax020216
Hamid Karzai: Afghanistan’s new leader
CBC News | December 2001
It is a measure of the respect for Hamid Karzai, the leader of Afghanistan’s interim government, that he wasn’t even in Bonn when he was selected to head the post-Taliban administration. He was in southern Afghanistan, preparing for the final push on the city of Kandahar.
Karzai comes from the dominant Pashtun tribe, and from the same clan of the former Afghan king Zahir Shah. For a brief time in the early 1990s he supported the Taliban, which had taken over when the holy warriors of the mujahedeen ended the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. That was when he regarded the Taliban as Pashtun, like himself.
He quickly became suspicious of the Taliban, not pleased with how it had been infiltrated by foreign elements such as Pakistani, Arab, and Chechen extremists. Seven years later, in 1999, the Taliban assassinated Karzai’s father, Abdul Ahad Karzai, once a parliamentary deputy in the Afghan government. The young Karzai and his father had campaigned against the Taliban, operating from a base in Quetta, just across the border in Pakistan.
Karzai then devoted himself to the campaign against the Taliban, determined to follow his father’s wishes that a multi-ethnic, broad-based government rule Afghanistan, starting with the convening of a grand tribal assembly known as a loya jirga.
This is what will happen now that the Taliban has surrendered. Karzai’s interim council takes office on December 22 and will run the country for six months until the loya jirga – expected to be called into session by the former king – decides on a regime that will govern the country for two years, when elections will be called.
For Washington, Karzai is the perfect choice
He has been educated in the West, speaks fluent English, and is at ease with the electronic media. He spent most of the 1980s in the United States. His family has operated Afghan restaurants in Chicago, San Francisco, Boston and Baltimore. He served as Afghanistan’s deputy foreign minister from 1992 to 1994, before the Taliban took over.
It didn’t take Karzai long to establish himself as a political as well as a military leader. Days after being selected to head the interim government, he was busy negotiating the surrender of top Taliban leaders, conducting the talks by satellite phone. He conducted the final negotiations face-to-face with about a dozen Taliban commanders, but not with Mullah Mohammed Omar, the spiritual leader of the Taliban.
Karzai faced the thorny problem of whether to grant personal amnesty to Omar in return for the surrender of Kandahar. Karzai told Agence France Presse he would be afforded protection if he renounced terrorism. “If he does not, then he (Omar) will not be safe,” Karzai said. U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has insisted that there can be no amnesty deal for Omar.
Karzai is a young man, only 46. He is tall, bald, with a carefully trimmed beard and moustache. He comfortably wears well-tailored suits and ties and often displays a quick and clever sense of humour.
He is considered a moderate Muslim. In the campaign against the Taliban, he commanded 4,000 Northern Alliance fighters, mostly in southern Afghanistan, in the push on Kandahar.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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