Hamid Karzai Biography

Hamid Karzai has been the president of Afghanistan since 2004. His father was the hereditary Khan (chief) of the Popalzai tribe in the Kandahar region of Afghanistan, and Hamid Karzai studied in Kabul and Simla, India in the 1970s. During the Soviet invasion in the 1980s, Karzai worked in the resistance, and after the Soviets were driven out he served as a deputy foreign minister in the re-established government (1992-94). Tense relations with the ruling Taliban led to Karzai living in exile in Pakistan in the late 1990s, but by October 2001 he was back in Afghanistan, playing a key role in the Taliban's fall from power. With help from the United States and the United Nations, Hamid Karzai stepped into the position of interim president in 2002 and began a worldwide diplomatic effort to help rebuild Afghanistan's government. He became Afghanistan's first popularly-elected president in September of 2004. Despite fierce political opposition and then charges of election fraud, Hamid Karzai was elected to his second five-year term in 2009.