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Huge Task Ahead for Hamid Karzai
Wednesday, December 5, 2001
(8:31 AM ET) (13:31 GMT)
Reuters

Hamid Karzai, the Pashtun tribal chief chosen to head the interim post-Taliban administration in Afghanistan, is unusually qualified to shoulder the huge task of trying to lead his war-torn country back to normal life.

A mix of traditional ties and modern experience meant he won the support of delegates at U.N.-sponsored talks in Bonn even though he was absent, away with his tribesmen preparing for a final assault on Taliban-held Kandahar in southern Afghanistan.

Karzai's traditional credentials could not be better. Tall, balding with a trim salt-and-pepper beard, he is chief of the large Popalzai tribal group around Kandahar and scion of a royalist family with a tradition of public service.

During the 1980s Soviet war, he helped fund and arm fighters from his tribe, which lives in southern Afghanistan.

Already a tribal elder at the age of 46, he also has a string of very modern skills, including fluent English and an easy good-humored presence on camera.

Karzai was deputy foreign minister from 1992 to 1994 after the Mujahideen defeated the Soviets. He had spent much of the 1980s in the United States -- where his family ran Afghan restaurants in Chicago, San Francisco, Boston and Baltimore -- and enjoys strong Western support.
(More: CNN.com News Source)
2001 © Reuters, Ltd.

Dan