Hamid Karzai, an ethnic Pashtun of the Popalzai tribe, was born in the village of Karz, which is located on the edge of Kandahar City in southern Afghanistan. His grandfather, Khair Mohammad Khan, had served in the 1919 Afghanistan's war of independence and as the Deputy Speaker of the Senate. Karzai's family was strong supporters of the former Afghan King, Zahir Shah. His uncle, Habibullah Karzai, served as representative of Afghanistan at the United Nations and is said to have accompanied Zahir Shah in the course of the King's state visit to the United States for a special meeting with U.S. President John F. Kennedy. His father, Abdul Ahad Karzai, served as the Deputy Speaker of the Parliament during the 1960s. Hamid Karzai attended Mahmood Hotaki Elementary School in Kandahar and Sayed Jamaluddin Afghan School in Kabul. He graduated from Habibia High School in 1976.
Karzai was involved in helping to provide financial and military support for the Mujahideen during the 1980s Soviet war in Afghanistan. The Mujahideen were secretly supplied and funded by the United States, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and Karzai was a contact for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) at the time.
While Karzai's brothers immigrated to the United States, Hamid Karzai remained in Pakistan during the Soviet occupation. He accompanied the first Mujahideen leaders into Kabul in 1992 following the Soviet withdrawal.
When the Taliban emerged in the mid 1990s, Karzai, like many other Afghans, supported them, because he saw them as a force that could finally end the violence and corruption in his country. However, he later broke with them and refused to serve as their ambassador to the United Nations, telling friends he felt that the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) was wrongly using them. Karzai stated that "there were many wonderful people in the Taliban."
When Karzai was a candidate in the 9 October 2004 presidential election, he won 21 of the 34 provinces, defeating his 22 opponents and becoming the first democratically elected leader of Afghanistan.
Although his campaigning was limited due to fears of violence, elections passed without significant incident. Following investigation by the UN of alleged voting irregularities, the national election commission on 3 November declared Karzai winner, without runoff, with 55.4% of the vote. This represented 4.3 million of the total 8.1 million votes cast.
It has been alleged by James Risen of the New York Times and others that Hamid Karzai’s brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai is a prominent figure in the Afghan drug trade, controlling a significant proportion of heroin or opium. In meetings with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, including a 2006 session with former US Ambassador to Afghanistan, Ronald E. Neumann, the CIA’s station chief and their British counterparts, American officials have talked about the allegations in hopes that the president might move his brother out of the country, said several people who took part in or were briefed on the talks. "We thought the concern expressed to Karzai might be enough to get him out of there," one official said. But President Karzai has resisted, demanding clear-cut evidence of wrongdoing, several officials said.
Officials of the Obama administration and other allied governments involved in Afghanistan have become increasingly concerned by some of Karzai’s recent behavior and statements, which reportedly included a threat, delivered at a closed-door meeting of Afghan legislators last weekend, that he would quit as president and join the Taliban if foreign interests pressed him too aggressively for reforms. In an interview with the Daily Rundown program on MSNBC, Galbraith, who formerly served as the U.N.’s No. 2 official in Afghanistan, questioned Karzai’s "mental stability" and suggested he might be on drugs. "He’s prone to tirades. He can be very emotional, act impulsively. In fact, some of the palace insiders say that he has a certain fondness for some of Afghanistan’s most profitable exports," Galbraith told the cable network.
Five U.S. intelligence- and foreign-policy officials, who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive information, told Declassified that they were unaware of any official U.S. government reporting, including intelligence reports, alleging that Karzai was using drugs. One of the officials, who is close to Afghan policymaking councils in the Obama administration, said flatly that Galbraith’s allegation was "outrageous." Other officials familiar with intelligence reporting on Afghanistan said they had seen or heard nothing of allegations regarding drug use by Karzai.
The issue was even raised at White House briefing conducted by presidential Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. A reporter noted that Galbraith had alleged on TV that Karzai was mentally unstable and possibly on drugs and asked Gibbs whether the Afghan president was "a credible partner to the U.S." Gibbs’s reply was noncommittal: "He is the democratically elected leader of Afghanistan. And ... we will not hesitate to ensure that the remarkable investment that our men and women are making is met with the type of governance that has to be in place in order to secure parts of a dangerous country.
Karzai was involved in helping to provide financial and military support for the Mujahideen during the 1980s and supported Taliban before. That’s why I won’t be surprised if he’s with them at least mentally.
When Afghans have thousands different kind of problems, he just want to talk with Taliban through these years, that’s the non sense that he does to make west believe is going forward toward peace.
The truth is if you’re a Talib, that means you’re a jihadist and it’s not possible to think the ideology will change or soften through the time because Islam is very straight forward religion, you are in the loop or out of it. That’s their rule.