Hamid Karzai Interview (page: 6 / 8) President of Afghanistan	Print Interview

Your father, who hated oppression and violence, suddenly found himself in this completely transformed country.

Hamid Karzai: Completely transformed country, and he was then assassinated three years ago by the Taliban and the terrorists, maybe al Qaeda, whoever. I don't know. I was in a meeting in a different part of town. My father had gone to his evening prayers, and when he was coming back, was shot.

My brother called me on the mobile phone, and said, "Hamid, our father was assassinated." Immediately, the first question that came to me was if he saw the assassin or saw the gun that was pointed at him. And...

When I came back to the hospital where my father was lying, I asked my brother, I said, "Did our father see the assassin or the gunman?" He said, "No, his back was to a gate. He was talking to somebody, and the assassin shot him from behind." I was relieved that he didn't see the man, and he didn't see the gun that was pointed at him, because he hated it so much. So that pain he did not suffer. He just was shot.
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Why was he assassinated?

Hamid Karzai: He was opposing the Taliban. He was calling for a Loya Jirga (traditional Afghan national council). He was openly talking to the rest of the world to remove the Taliban, to liberate Afghanistan.

You showed tremendous courage in the way you handled your father's funeral procession. Can you talk about how that came to happen?

Hamid Karzai: Yes.

We decided to take him (my father) to Afghanistan, to Kandahar. The Taliban were in charge there. And lots of people came to me and said, "Don't do that. You will go into Afghanistan and the Taliban will arrest you." I said, "No. I want to go, and if they have the guts, let them arrest me." So I just went on the -- together with the procession. We were about --I don't know -- a hundred cars or something, and we took my father's body to Kandahar and buried him there and then left Kandahar. People felt at that time that that was a silly move.
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Because it was so dangerous?

Hamid Karzai: It was so risky, exactly, so risky. We had no guns, we had no arms, we had nothing. We just moved in. But of course the Taliban were frightened. They were so frightened that they brought tanks all around the city. They took all the city corners and crossroads and protected them with tanks. We were just civilians there.

At what point did it become clear to you that you were going to need to take a leadership role in your country, not just in your tribe?

Hamid Karzai: I had begun playing a kind of a national role when I began to work actively for the Loya Jirga, the Grand Council. I began to oppose actively the Taliban as brutal people, as people who meant no good for Afghanistan or the rest of the world. I began to know that they were harboring Osama in 1996 and I told the world at that time.

You told the U.S.?

Hamid Karzai: Oh, yes, so clearly, so clearly.

That must have been frustrating for you.

Hamid Karzai: I got frustrated, but never lost hope. I kept going, kept going, kept going, never stopped.

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