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As the U.S. Armed Forces were preparing for a confrontation with the Taliban in September 2001, Karzai began urging NATO states to purge his country of al-Qaeda. He told BBC "These Arabs, together with their foreign supporters and the Taliban, destroyed miles and miles of homes and orchards and vineyards... They have killed Afghans. They have trained their guns on Afghan lives... We want them out.".....
After 7 October 2001 launch of Operation Enduring Freedom, the United Front (Northern Alliance) worked with teams of U.S. special forces. Together, they overthrew the Taliban regime and mustered support for a new government in Afghanistan. Karzai and his group were in Quetta (Pakistan) at the time, where they began their covert operation.
On 4 November 2001, American special operation forces flew Karzai out of Afghanistan for protection.
On 5 December 2001, Hamid Karzai and his group of fighters survived a friendly fire missile attack by U.S. Air Force pilots in southern Afghanistan. The group suffered injuries and was treated in the United States; Karzai received injuries to his facial nerves, as can sometimes be noticed during his speeches.
In December 2001, political leaders gathered in Germany to agree on new leadership structures. Under 5 December Bonn Agreement, they formed an Interim Administration and named Karzai Chairman of a 29-member governing committee. He was sworn in as leader on 22 December.
When Karzai finally arrived in Kabul, in December 2001, he was installed at the helm of a government bankrolled by foreign money and staffed by officials he had not chosen. Under the Bonn agreement, brokered by the West, many key roles had gone to warlords in return for their cooperation with the United States. Karzai “never overcame the legacy of Bonn, where everyone else at his cabinet given to him had the same legitimacy as him,” says a longtime aide. “So he never really embraced the government as his, always mistrusted it.” Seventeen of the 30 cabinet members were Northern Alliance commanders, and those commanders also got a share of power at the local level, installing men who had served under them. Over one meal at his palace, Karzai asked General John Abizaid, the head of U.S. Central Command at the time, why America was supporting certain warlords who were causing his government trouble. “They are one of us, just like you are one of us,” Abizaid responded, in an attempt, he later said, to encourage political accommodation. Afghan forces allied with the American counterinsurgency mission are designated “green” by the U.S. military. “We are not going to be green on green,” Abizaid said.....
After Karzai was installed into power, his actual authority outside the capital city of Kabul was said to be so limited that he was often derided as the "Mayor of Kabul".
The situation was particularly delicate since Karzai and his administration have not been equipped either financially or politically to influence reforms outside of the region around Kabul. Other areas, particularly the more remote ones, have historically been under the influence of various local leaders.
In 2004, he rejected an international proposal to end poppy production in Afghanistan through aerial spraying of chemical herbicides, fearing that it would harm the economic situation of his countrymen.
Under Karzai's administration, electoral fraud was so apparent that Afghanistan's status as a democratic state came into question.[107][108] Furthermore, a special court set up personally by Karzai in defiance of constitutional norms sought to reinstate dozens of candidates who were removed for fraud in the 2010 parliamentary elections by the Independent Electoral Commission.[109]
.....One morning in February of this year, the bodies of 21 army soldiers, killed in the eastern province of Kunar, were brought to the military hospital in Kabul. Karzai used the incident as a pretext to cancel a trip abroad, but instead of attending the funerals, he remained in his palace, busily politicking. When I told him the public thought he was a leader who did not stand up for his soldiers, the president became defensive.
“But I do. I have done it very often. That’s Western propaganda,” he said, thumping his desk. “They are the sons of this soil, they are giving their life. But that life is gone in a war that’s not ours.”
On the same day he said those words, Karzai ordered the questioning of three of his brightest special-forces officers on vague charges of, among other things, spying for Western countries—an odd charge, considering they are equipped and advised by NATO.