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 Hamid Karzai
is the President of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. Afghanistan's presidential elections were held on October 9, 2004, and on
November 3, 2004, the Joint Electoral Management Body of Afghanistan finally
certified the elections and declared Hamid Karzai the winner with 55.4% of the
votes. He took the Presidential oath of allegiance at Salam Khana Palace on
December 7, 2004 in the presence of dignitaries and officials from around the
world.
Before that, Karzai served as the President of the Transitional Government in Afghanistan; he was chosen as head of state by a Loya Jirga in June 2002.
Hamid Karzai was not widely known until he was chosen to lead a provisional administration
which was set up in Bonn, Germany in December 2001. Karzai was actually a compromise that was reached between the former king's (Mohammad Zahir) supporters and the United
Front (UNIFSA), whose ground troops, with help from the United States, defeated
the Taliban and drove them out of Kabul.
During the Soviet war, Karzai helped transfer arms and money to the Mujahideen,
and also later served as deputy foreign minister under President Burhanuddin
Rabbani. However, when the Taliban emerged on the scene, Karzai supported
them, and even worked as a consultant to help a major US oil company, Unocal
sign a deal with the Taliban to build a pipeline through Afghanistan. The deal
was not reached after women rights organizations in the United States put
pressure on Unocal to not do business with the Taliban due to their extremely
oppressive treatment of women in the country. Eventually, Karzai grew tired of
the Taliban and later in 2001, after the attacks on the World Trade Center in
New York, began to secretly work with the United States to find an alternative
to Taliban rule in Afghanistan.
Karzai was born in 1957 in the village of Karz, near Kandahar, and comes from the well known Popalzai
tribe
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