Analysis: Karzai's meteoric rise to power

Being a Durrani Pushtun, Kandahari, anti-Taliban and supporter of former Afghan king Zahir Shah contributed to Hamed Karzai gaining acceptability as the head of the interim government, put together by the UN and the U.S. and its allies for Afghanistan.

The 46-year-old Karzai's rise has been meteoric. He ran Professor Sebghatullah Mojadeddi's office in Peshawar in the 1980s when the latter led a moderate ad nationalist mujahideen group and often acted as his spokesman and looked after his media relations.

Upon becoming the president for two months of the first mujahideen government that was installed in Kabul as a result of the Peshawar Accord, Mojadeddi made Karzai his deputy foreign minister. Karzai continued in his office long after Mojadeddi completed his term and Professor Burhanuddin Rabbani became the president.

But Karzai, powerless and fed up with the mujahideen infighting that turned Kabul into ruins and killed about 50,000 people, quit his largely ceremonial job in early 1994.

He initially supported the Taliban, who had emerged in Kandahar in late 1994, because they brought peace and security to his lawless native province. In fact, some Taliban military commanders, including Herat governor Mulla Yar Mohammad, were on very good terms with the influential Karzai family.

But like many other Afghans, Karzai also lost patience with the Taliban when they refused to soften their rigid policies and dealt with their opponents with an iron hand. The murder of his father, Abdul Ahad Karzai, in Quetta by unknown assailants apparently prompted Karzai to openly come out against the Taliban. The Karzai family suspected the Taliban to be behind the murder.

The elder Karzai, a gentleman by every definition of the word, had served as a member of Afghanistan's parliament. His election from Kandahar showed his popularity and explained the family's tribal influence. This factor appears to have played a major role in strengthening Karzai's candidature for the top job in the new Afghan government.

Reports from Bonn, where the UN-sponsored Afghanistan conference took place for nine days, indicated that Zahir Shah's first preference for the job was his former justice minister Abdul Sattar Seerat and not Karzai.

Seerat, an ethnic Uzbek, was more experienced, was an Islamic scholar and much closer to the former king than Karzai. By promoting Seerat's candidature, Zahir Shah also wanted to refute the impression that he represented only his Pushtun community and had no support among the minority ethnic groups.

But the Northern Alliance, the dominant military force in Afghanistan after capturing Kabul and almost all of northern Afghanistan from the Taliban with active assistance from the U.S., Britain, Russia, Iran, France, India, Uzbekistan, Turkey, Tajikistan and a host of other countries, wanted Karzai instead of Seerat as head of the interim government.

Claiming to represent all the non-Pushtun ethnic and religious minorities, it didn't want Seerat to represent both the former king and the Uzbeks in the cabinet. The Northern Alliance, as well as the U.S. and its allies that staged the Bonn conference, were also keen to pick up someone like Karzai belonging to the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar to wean away the Pushtuns from Mulla Mohammad Omar's Taliban movement and garner support for Zahir Shah.

Both Zahir Shah and Karzai are Durrani Pushtuns, who dominate Kandahar and rest of the southwestern provinces where the Taliban enjoyed their strongest backing, and nominating Karzai as the head of the post-Taliban government was a shrewd move to hasten Mulla Omar's fall.

In the give and take that went on behind the doors in Bonn and prolonged the conference duration, the Northern Alliance conceded the office of chairman or prime minister of the interim government to Zahir Shah's camp but got some of the most powerful positions in the bargain.

Of the 16 ministerial posts it won in the 30-member interim administration, the Northern Alliance also got the defence portfolio for Mohammad Faheem Qasim, the interior for Mohammad Yunis Qanuni and foreign affairs for Dr Abdullah.

It goes without saying that Karzai or any other minister would to a large extent feel constrained by the presence of Fahim's armed Tajik fighters and Qanuni's policemen.

Karzai as deputy foreign minister in 1992 and his then party leader, Professor Mojadeddi, as the president at that time knew pretty well how to wield real power in Kabul. Both would recall how the then defence minister Ahmad Shah Masood's fighters turned back Mojadeddi when he arrived to make a speech as the country's president on Kabul radio ad television.

It was Masood who called the shots then and it could be Fahim and Qanuni's turn now to fix the interim government's direction.