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Hamid Karzai:

Crowd Shaker,

History Maker

of the Parliament during the 1960s and grandson of war hero Khair Mohammad Khan. He graduated in 1983 from the Himachal Pradesh University in Shimla, India, majoring in political since and language studies. By his mid-twenties, Karzai was fluent in Dari (Persian), Urdu, Hindi, Arabic, English, French and Pashto, and after obtaining his master’s degree in India, he moved to neighboring Pakistan. During the 80s, he worked at a fundraising institution for the anti-communist mujahideen party during the Soviet war in Afghanistan. Given how the mujahideen was supported by the majority of capitalist countries, and especially the United States, it was no surprise when Karzai began working as a contractor for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

 

The withdrawal of Russian forces in 1988 culminated in the fall of the Soviet-backed government of Najibullah only four years later. In 1992, contingent upon the end of the Cold War in 1991 and the Peshawar accords, the prideful Islamic State of Afghanistan was born. Hamid Karzai was appointed as Deputy Foreign Minister under the government of newly elected president Burhanuddin Rabbani, both of them popular figures in Kabul’s political scenery. However, in 1993, Karzai was arrested by Mohammad Fahim under the premise that he was a spy for Gulbudin Hekmatyar, a man in opposition of Rabbani. Nonetheless, he pled not guilty, claiming that all he was attempting to pacifically mediate the relationship between both extremist leaders. Thus, Karzai saw no other choice but to flee the capital and escape imprisonment.

 

Concomitantly, the Taliban rose in 1994 as one of the sub-sections within the mujahideen, shortly after the Pakistani government had asked the anti-communist party to guard a convoy in charge of opening a trade route between Pakistan and Central Asia. Hence, the Pakistani government continues to supply the group with military training, financial support and weapons, which prompted the Taliban to take over a series of Afghan cities and, 

eventually, take over Kabul in 1996. Initially, Hamid Karzai supported the oppositionist group as a legitimate form of government: they proposed to help the country stop widespread gang violence and end corruption. In 11 September 1998, he became the Taliban’s ambassador under a direct request of Mawlawi Abdul Kabir, the leader of the group. Nevertheless, Karzai refused, claiming he did not agree with the relationship between the opposition group and the Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI), stating the Taliban was being manipulated and would soon become puppets of the current government if they were not careful with their choices of allies.

 

By 2000-01, alongside Massoud, Karzai made a tour around the United States and Europe in an attempt to gather support for their anti-Taliban movement. It was during these visits that he warned the U.S. president, George W. Bush, about how the Taliban was connected to Al-Qaeda, and that they planned on attacking the United States. Their warnings were ignored, and two months later came the tragic day engraved in the memory of all Americas: 11 September 2001. Only two days prior to the attack, Ahmad Shah Massoud had been assassinated in a suicide bombing by Al-Qaeda agents, leaving Karzai alone in the battle against terrorism. Towards the end of the month, he gave an interview to the BBC, stating that “These Arabs [Al-Qaeda], together with their foreign supporters and the Taliban, destroyed miles and miles of homes and orchards and vineyards (…) They have killed Afghans. They have trained whiter guns on Afghan lives (…) We want them out.” (BBC)

 

On 7 October 2001, after the launch of Operation Enduring Freedom, the Northern Alliance (now known as the United Front) began working with the U.S.’s Special Forces to overthrow the Taliban regime and install a new democratic government in Afghanistan. Towards the end of the month, Karzai and his fighters were “mistakenly injured” by a U.S. “friendly fire” missile attack. (biography) In 4 November, Karzai was flown out of Afghanistan for medical attention to his facial wounds, considering that the local hospitals were overloaded with people and could not attend to his injuries adequately. As he returned to his home country in December, four leaders of the major ethnic groups in Afghanistan had met with U.S. political leaders in Bonn, Germany, and set forth the Bonn Agreement. As an outcome of such meeting, Karzai was elected the Chair of the Transitional Administration under the interim government for the following six months.

 

 

 

By June 2002, during the Loya Jirga, a “traditional Pashtun political meeting held to select a leader”, the approved new constitution instilled a presidential democratic government and asserted Hamid Karzai as the interim president for the following two years. (dictionary.com) Mohammed Fahim, the man who had previously accused him of spionage, ironically became his Minister of Defense, emphasizing Karzai’s forgiving nature and his capacity of putting his personal issues aside if such actions benefitted his nation. In 2004, for the first time in almost twenty years, Afghanistan held proper presidential elections, to which Hamid Karzai won by a 55% majority vote, beating other 22 candidates, and became president of the Islamic Republic of 

During the United Nations General Assembly meeting in September 2006, Hamid Karzai rose and stated that “Afghanistan [had] become the worst victim of terrorism”, complaining about how it was rebounding to his country and how civilians were paying the price for the U.S.’s actions. In addition, the amount of revenue his government was forced to spend in dismantling the terrorist organization along its borders was depriving children from education and preventing health workers from doing their jobs. He offered, in exchange of support for his cause against terrorism, to eliminate the opium poppy cultivations, which his studies showed were fueling the Taliban insurgency. Nonetheless, as the Iraq war

broke out in mid-2003, American troops were transferred from Afghanistan to Iran, allowing for a resurgence of the Taliban and, once again, endangering the civilian population. As Karzai pleaded that, if the U.S. wished to continued its seek to exterminate Al-Qaeda and the pursue of their economic interests, that it did not forget the other conflicts that it had left unresolved- still, his pleas were ignored. In a video broadcast to his people in September 2006, Karzai stated that if the United States had invested the amount of money they spent with the Iran-Iraq War, his country would be in heaven in less than one year. (Afghanistan Country Study Guide, Volume 1, page 96). This was the watershed in Afghani-American relations, where the Asian country began to resent its previously irrefutable ally.

 

Afghanistan’s economic prosperity seen in 2000-05 was short lived, considering that by 2009 and the end of Hamid Karzai’s first term, his government was blamed for the resurgence of the neo-Taliban, widespread corruption that rendered the country inefficient and the explosion of opium trade- Karzai had not kept his promise to the United Nations. Ewere scheduled for 20 August, and polls suggested that Karzai would not be able to return in a second term. Still, contrary to public opinion, the results showed that he had obtained over 50% of votes, hence raising questions about how fraudulent the election had been. There were reports of “low voter turnout, widespread ballot stuffing, [and] intimidation”, thus resulting in the call for a second round of votes, scheduled for 7 November (thetelegraph). Suspiciously, Karzai’s opponent Abdullah Abdullah withdrew from the race five days before the elections, guaranteeing the previous president a second term to end in 2014.
 

Protests sparked all over the country as Afghans refused to continue with a corrupt government who did nothing but take advantage of his people while pretending to stop violence in the country. In reaction to these accusations, Karzai launched a campaign of pardoning all militants willing to “lay down their weapons and join the nation’s rebuilding”- an act of desperation, seeing that he feared that riots would force him out of the government. (biography) Aware of this statement, president Barack Obama in 1 December 2009 declared that the U.S. would deploy 30,000 addition troops to Afghanistan to help decrease the Taliban’s growing influence in the region and to monitor Al-Qaeda activity. However, in exchange, Karzai had to compromise in cleaning his government of corruption and investing in the public sector so his country could once again thrive economically.

 

Albeit his statement to compromise with the U.S.’s requirements, not 

Controversy remains on rather the Afghans were better off under the Taliban regime than during Hamid Karzai’s rule- still, there cannot be a standard measure to compare both regimes, leaving time to decide the fate of the people and of the Afghan nation.

 

Nonetheless, it is possible to affirm that, as stated by historian E. H. Carr, all Hamid Karzai has been doing ever since he came to power is been following the wave of history, where his country and its people are accustomed to having the government usurped by imperialist power, then re-conquered by local guerrilla forces and suffering from widespread corruption. It will take more than just a few years to turn over this tide of history, and from what it seems, this change will not be born from Karzai’s administration.

A few months later, in a preemptive move, Hamid Karzai moved to Quetta, Pakistan, taking his entire family with him in fear that the Taliban would launch a violent strike against the Afghani government. Unfortunately, in 14 July 1999, his father, Abdul Ahad Karzai, was killed early in the morning while coming home from a mosque. As he inquired about his dad’s last moments, he stumbled into the information that he had been gunned by Taliban leaders- their form of retaliation for Karzai’s refusal to join their cause. After such a traumatic event, Karzai pledged allegiance to the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan, led by ex-president Rabbani and his Defense Minister Ahmad Shah Massoud. This resistance group, also known as the Northern Alliance, was a military front formed in 1996, contingent upon the Taliban’s takeover of the Afghani capital. While they were backed by Iran, India, Tajikistan, Russia and the United States, the Taliban was supported by the Al-Qaeda and the Pakistan Armed Forces, creating perhaps another proxy.

 

Afghanistan, leading to a rebirth of hope in his people who saw this as a fresh start for the troubled country. 

 

However, Karzai faced a rough start at the beginning of his first term of presidency. His nickname was “mayor of Kabul” given that, historically, the rural areas of Afghanistan were ruled by tribal warlords or local leaders, and the government had no control over them. The country, since the consolidation of its boundaries in 1921, carried only hostile relationships with its neighbors, aggravating its already deteriorating economic problems. The majority of people lived off subsistence farming and adhered to tribal traditions, thus once again making Karzai’s promise to help the country develop more challenging. His first decision was to conquer his people politically and pacifically, whence initiating a successful campaign of including local warlords into his government by granting them positions in his cabinet, hence extending his sphere of influence to the most remote areas of his country- it was an alliance system, similar to that seen between European nations pre-1914: all provinces allied to Karzai compromised themselves to protect Kabul if it were attacked by the Taliban or Al-Qaeda, and vice versa.

 

One of the biggest and most internationally alarming aspects of Karzai’s country was its cultivation of opium poppy plants. In November 2004, the United States offered to aerially spray chemical herbicides on the regions they believed were infested with opium plantations; yet the president denied such an offer. He believed the harm done to the plantations would only deteriorate the economic situation of his rural population. Furthermore, rumors went that the president’s brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, was involved in trafficking narcotics, and that this was a move to protect his family- still, nothing on this regard was ever proven.

 

Despite the speculative scandal, for the first time in decades, Afghanistan’s economy grew rapidly- however, they still relied heavily on foreign aid. Throughout Karzai’s entire first term (2004-09), public discontent grew, where protests were led against government corruption and manipulation of media. In addition, protestors questioned the high amount of civilian causalities as a consequence of the United States’ maniac pursuit of Al-Qaeda and Osama bin-Laden- after all, the terrorist group was no longer in their territory, and yet they continued to suffer for their actions.

 

much has been done to improve Afghanistan ever since 2009, leading to over seven confirmed assassination attempts to the president in the past four years. Corruption is still widespread within the country, civilians continue to be murdered by Taliban and American troops despite Karzai’s declaration that Obama should accelerate the removal of all U.S. personnel from Afghani soil, and the country still finds itself in an economic pit hole. Rumors state that the president intends to run for a third term next year as well as that he has been communicating with the Taliban to attempt an alliance after all American troops are withdrawn by December 2014. 

 

Born on 24 December 1957 in Karz, province of Kandahar in Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai was the son of the Deputy Speaker

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