Hamid Karzai

Hamid Karzai (born 24 December 1957) is an Afghan politician who led Afghanistan from December 2001 to September 2014: chairman of the interim administration, then interim president, then the country's first democratically elected president, winning the elections of 2004 and 2009. A Popalzai Durrani Pashtun, he is also chief of the Popalzai tribe, a position he inherited from his father. ^{1 2}

Karzai was born at Karz, a village near Kandahar, the son of Abdul Ahad Karzai, a deputy speaker of the Afghan parliament. He attended Habibia High School in Kabul, graduating in 1976, and took a master's degree in international relations and political science at Himachal Pradesh University in India in 1983. ^{1 3}

During the Soviet–Afghan War Karzai raised funds for the mujahideen in Pakistan. In 1992 he served as deputy foreign minister in the government of Burhanuddin Rabbani. His father was assassinated at Quetta in July 1999, and Hamid succeeded him as Popalzai chief. In late 2001 he led the uprising around Kandahar against the Taliban, and the Bonn Conference made him chairman of the Afghan Interim Administration on 22 December 2001. ^{1 2}

Karzai became interim president in June 2002, won the presidential election of 2004 with 55.4 per cent of the vote, and was re-elected in 2009, serving until 29 September 2014, when Ashraf Ghani succeeded him. The English article records that international criticism of his government centred on its failure to secure the country against Taliban attacks, on systemic governmental corruption, and on widespread claims of electoral fraud in the 2009 election; Karzai answered that some statements criticising the ballot were 'totally fabricated', while accepting there had been instances of fraud and irregularities, and a 2019 Washington Post report is cited describing his government as corrupt and tolerated by the United States. The article's lead records that he was also accused of corruption. These are carried here as the article's attributed criticism and his recorded answers, not as findings. ¹

Karzai remained in Kabul after the Taliban takeover of 2021. He stated that the Taliban had not captured the city by force but had been invited in to prevent chaos, and that the new government needed internal legitimacy, through a general election or a loya jirga, to gain international recognition. ¹

Only one structured value names a school for Karzai: the Arabic article's infobox gives his religion as Sunni Islam, the same value mirrored in other editions. The Urdu article's infobox carries no religion value, and no article text names his religion; the English article's religion content concerns his government's Shia Personal Status Law and his description of the Taliban as his brothers, which is state policy and statecraft. Under the museum's two-source rule his faith is recorded as unknown, with the structured attestation preserved in the data file for a founder's word. ^{1 3 2}

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.
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