Interview: Hamid Karzai
President of Afghanistan

(Immediately prior to this interview, President Karzai addressed the Academy of Achievement in a symposium at Dublin Castle. Excerpts from that address are included along with his answers here.)

We are having this talk in Ireland, not too far from a region that has been rent with brutality and religious strife for centuries. Finally, there is a modicum of peace in Northern Ireland. Was there an ethnic component to the strife in Afghanistan, because of tribal differences and different languages? Or do you think that's off the subject?

Hamid Karzai: No, off the subject. It was foreign intervention, it was terrorism that brutalized the whole of Afghanistan. They tried to give it names and justifications, and those names and justifications were ethnic or political, but it was clearly a terrorist movement, backed by outsiders, to take Afghanistan and to create a different kind of warlord.

I told the French, I told the U.S., I told the Europeans that this somebody called Osama -- and people coming to me -- common Afghans came to tell me that the Taliban are bringing in horrible people from the Arab world, from Pakistan, and these are killers. "These are very inhuman people. Talk to the rest of the world. Liberate Afghanistan from these people, because they are going to hurt everybody, not only Afghans." And I went on a daily basis, I went to the rest of the world to tell them that this is what's going on in Afghanistan. I hardly stayed two or three days a week in my home with my family, and later on when I got married with my wife. I kept telling them. Nobody believed me. When they believed me they thought, "Well, it may not be as serious as he's talking about." Or if it is as serious as he's talking about, maybe his estimation of the Afghan resolve to get rid of the Taliban and terrorism was something that they thought I was overstating. So all those things probably made things a bit difficult.

In the year 2000, I appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. I told the Senate that if you don't address the situation in Afghanistan, things may be horrible. When September 11th occurred I went to the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad and I told them what I had been telling the world about terrorism in Afghanistan. "Now you saw it. What do you do? We are ready to help." There was some disbelief. They said, "Yes, Hamid, we know that these people are horrible, that they are disastrous, but the Afghan people may not let us act there." I said, "No, we know that the Afghan people are fed up with them. They want change, but they can't bring about change without the help of the United States, without the help of the world community, because they are incapacitated by years of destruction."

"Hamid," my father would always tell me, "Go get us the United States, then we will succeed. Without that you might just kill us and get no results."

By the first of October of 2001, just a month and a few days after 9/11, I was one day sitting with four of my colleagues and I told them that Afghanistan cannot have any more of this. Let's move in and the world community might help us. They said, "No, the world will not help us." I said, "They will." They said, "You have been telling us for five or six years. Nobody has helped." I said, "This is a different time. Think of New York. Think of what happened there. The world has woken up. Let's move into Afghanistan. Let's move into the heart of Taliban."

It was not just a thing that occurred that day. We had worked for five or six years in the community. So we decided to move into Afghanistan secretly. We went to the borders with two motorbikes and four people.

In the morning before we moved into Afghanistan, I told my colleagues, I said, "Listen, friends, we are moving into Afghanistan. It's taken over by terrorists. It's taken over by Taliban. It's taken over by all sorts of foreign people that have come to Afghanistan that are ruining life for us and for the rest of the world. We might be captured the moment we enter Afghanistan and be killed. Are you willing to face that?" I also said, "We have 60 percent chance of death and 40 percent chance to live and survive." Winning was no consideration. I mean we could not even think of that. They said, "All right, let's do it." We got on two motorbikes. We drove into Afghanistan, straight from the Pakistani border.

The U.S. bombing had just begun or was about to begin in a day or two.

We moved in on two motorbikes. We got a flat tire four times along the way on the highway. But the Taliban did not capture us. So we were lucky. God was with us surely. We moved into Kandahar City, the heartland of the Taliban, spent the night in a villager's house. He protected us. That was the first sign for me that people would help. The next morning, early morning, he came to me and said, "Hamid, what do you want to do?" I said, "I want to remove the Taliban." He said, "But how? What do you have? These two motorbikes and four people, with you. Three people?" I said, "No sure, not that. But there have been people I have been talking to for many years including yourself. Let's do something." He looked at me in disbelief and he went out and he came back. He said, "Look, I guess if you stayed a few more days in Kandahar the Taliban would capture you. So you'd better leave. Go to the central part of Afghanistan where possibly, if there's a war, where there are mountains. You can hide. You can organize a resistance."

The next morning he brought me a taxi -- the taxi driver was his cousin -- and the taxi drove us towards central Afghanistan. Nobody recognized us. We had all sorts of tricks to disguise ourselves. We went to Uruzgan, a province in the center of Afghanistan, and spent one night there.

I contacted a friend in a village near there. I said, "I'm here in your province, in your provincial capital. I would like to come and have dinner with you this evening and I would like you to invite so and so and so and so." I mentioned three tribal chiefs. He sent me back a message through his son saying, "For God's sake, don't travel during the day time. Come to us on foot, and I will send somebody to show you the way."

We set out on foot and we went through mountains and through villages and a lot of times the man would go very far away from the straight path, and I would ask why. "Why are you doing that? There is nobody here." He said, "There is a group there," or "There is a house there. If they hear our footsteps, they will come out to search, and if they see we are 11 people, they will suspect and they will arrest us."

Just thinking that we might be arrested made him change the road four or five kilometers. We arrived at that man's house. We had dinner. I saw disbelief in him, total shock in him that I was there and that I was trying to organize a resistance against the Taliban. The others came to see us secretly there, after everybody went out of the house, we were alone, the four of us.

This mullah, the clergy said, "Hamid, you are here to remove the Taliban." I said, "Yes." He said, "Yes, you have been talking about this for years now. But how can you remove them?" I said, "Well you know, people hate them." He said, "Yes, surely people hate them." I said, "Well, so let's get together and fight them. There are only about 60 or 70 of them at the capital, at the provincial capital." And then this mullah told me, "You really want to fight them?" I said, "Yes." Then he got closer to me a little bit. Then he got more closer to me, and said, "I want you -- if you really want to defeat the Taliban -- I want you to ask the United States to send some planes to bomb the Governor's house and to bomb the military command office." I was totally shocked. I said, "Mr. So-and-so, how shameful of you. I am shocked that you are asking me to ask the U.S. planes to come and bomb my country." He said, "Well then, you are not serious. If you are serious, you ask the U.S. to come and help us and win this war against terrorism. If you don't, you are not serious. They are going to kill our people. You are working for terrorism and you leave this place."

I told this man that I could not do this. He said, "Well, if you cannot do this, then you better leave, because I'm not going to allow you to kill my children and woman because of your desire to defeat the Taliban with the two or three guns that we have. We cannot do that. I said, "I have some money. We will buy about 15 guns and do that." He said, "No." That was the strongest indication that the Afghan people were adamantly trying to get rid of terrorism in Afghanistan. They were real patriots in that they knew the reality of life. They were pragmatists. They could not fight terrorism on their own.

So I moved out of his house, came to another village and began to speak with more people. Before I went into Afghanistan I did not know that there was something called Al Qaeda. We knew about Osama, we knew there were terrorists, but not the name Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda and the Taliban were immensely powerful, immensely strong, in terms of resources and equipment.

The Taliban had heard of my presence in that area and that the Arabs and some Pakistanis with them and the Taliban had gotten together 1500 people to attack us. The villagers came to me and said, "What do you want? Do you want to fact them here or do you want to do something else? I said, "What will happen if we face them here?" He drew a dramatic picture that shook me to my bowels. He said, "Hamid, if you face them here, they will come with their rocket launchers, with their RP-7s --" RP-7 is a kind of rocket thing -- "And they will blow up our women and children and their flesh would be hanging on trees." When I heard this, I was shaken, terrified. The imagination that the children would be blown up and there would be these trees with -- their flesh would be spread on trees! I said, "No, no, no, of course I don't want to face them here. Then what should I do?" He said, "Go to the mountains." I said, "All right, let's go to the mountains." I asked people, "Who is willing to go with me?" Fifty people said, "We'll go with you." And we began the journey. We went to the mountains.

It took us 13 hours to arrive at a place where there was one man, with two of his children and his wife, all alone in a little hut in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of mountains. This one man with his wife and two children fed, for the first day that we arrived, 50 people. For the second day we were 90 people, for the third day, we were 120 people and he fed us all in that village. Not a village, in that home, in that area. There I saw the next most remarkable thing. People said, "Can you have weapons?" I said, "No. "Do you have weapons?" "No." "Do you have money "No." "What do you have?" I said, "I have you 50 people or 100 people that you are here." They said, "Well, this man is probably crazy." They got together somewhere, away from me. They began to consult each other, the elders and the young men. Then they came back to me. Then they said, "Can you call the U.S. and ask them for weapons?" I said, "Yes. Maybe I can call, yes. This is a proposition that I can accept. Maybe I can do that." They said, "All right. Call the U.S. and see if you can be given some weapons."

I called the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad. I said, "I am Hamid Karzai." They said, "Oh yes, of course, we know you. Where are you? Are you alive?" I said, "Of course. I'm talking to you, I have to be alive." They said, "Oh good that you are alive. What is it that we can do for you?" I said, "Can you send us weapons?" You will be surprised. They said, "Yes, where are you?" I said, "Well, I don't know where I am. There are mountains here, there is a village." That's what technology does. They said, "Where is that?" I said, "This is Uruzgan." "Okay, we know Uruzgan. How far are you away from the capital of Uruzgan?" I said, "Well, eleven hours by foot." They couldn't guess that. They said, "What do you mean eleven hours by foot?" I said, "Well, I have trouble. Eleven hours by foot and I'm in a valley here." They said, "Which way? East or west?" I said, "I don't know if I'm east of the city or west of the city. I cannot tell." Then I said, "I'll call you in a half an hour." Then I went around and asked people, "Which way are we?" Finally somebody said, "Probably we are west." And I said, "All right." And I called back, I said, "Here is somebody that says probably we are west." They said, "Fine. You go tonight and you make four fires..." -- this is unbelievable -- "...in a range of 100 meters away from each other, at four corners of a place that you think is flat in these mountains. We will find out where you are."

I went and I asked people. I said, "Go make four fires at about 11 in the evening." He looked at me and he said, "Why? Four fires on top of four mountains in the evening?" I said, "It's cold. We'll be warmer there. So let's go." They said, "Fine." They went and collected wood and made four fires. The next day I called again and they said, "We know where you are." I don't know, satellites or whatever. It was done with imagery. "Now tomorrow you expect our weapons." I said, "All right." Then we waited. It didn't come, and we waited and it didn't come. At 1:30 in the morning -- at one o'clock I was very tired, so I went to sleep right there. We slept in -- what do you call -- where shepherds take their animals at night during the summer? I don't know the name in English. Animal rooms. A manger? Fine, yes, something like that. So we slept in that. Suddenly somebody came and said, "Hamid, wake up. The planes are here." And when I woke up the planes were really there. The planes were really there.

We received food, ammunition and weapons in the middle of nowhere in central Afghanistan at 2:00 a.m. in the morning by three American planes that flew probably from the U.S. or Europe or somewhere that dropped us 15 parcels. They did not fall in the right place, though. They went quite across to the other mountains, but we went after them and by the next morning we recovered them.

The Taliban came after us just the day after the weapons came, 400 of them. A villager an hour away from us woke up when he saw so many troops coming towards us. This villager ran toward us and informed one of our sentries that there were 400 of them coming.

The man came to me, woke me up at about 4:30 in the morning and I was in a tent that was made out of a parachute of the things that came from the sky and he said that, "They are coming." I said, "Who?" He said, "What do you mean 'who?' The Taliban!" This villager is here and he said, "They are coming." I said, "All right. Let's go and stop them." I went back to sleep. Imagine. I never imagined that they would dare come to us 11 hours away and walk all that long. After another half an hour he came by. He said, "I have two prisoners." I said, "What do you mean two prisoners?" He said, "The Taliban. Two Afghans have come and surrendered and they told him that 400 are on their way. They are mostly Arabs and Pakistanis. They are after you. They will kill you, you can be sure."

In a few minutes fighting had begun. We felt that we were defeated, so we ran out of the top of the mountain. We had no communications. We had nothing, only the guns that we had received the night before from America. By evening, when we learned that they were defeated, it was too late By that time we had decided to split. We had sent some of our forces down the valley, some of our forces to the western villages, and there were only about eleven of us, that wonderful group. That we had completely lost emerged in the evening and said, "Look we have won. The Taliban have all gone away and the area is back in our hands." I said, "Too late. Everybody has left. We have asked them to go away." That is how the other part of the journey began. From this part onwards, ladies and gentlemen, is the best part of the story. Not a single shot was fired by us against the Taliban. They kept running themselves. Any village that we would go to, the Taliban from that village would run away. Any town that you would go to, the Taliban from that town would run away. Any place that you would go to, the Taliban would run away. There I learned that the people in Afghanistan were in such a pain, in such a terrible suffering that the slightest opportunity given, they would defend themselves, they would liberate their country.

We'd like to know a little bit about your childhood and your life before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Could you tell us a little bit about your parents, where you were born, what life was like?

Hamid Karzai: I was born in a village south of Kandahar City, one of the major provinces of Afghanistan, in a conservative family of Afghans. I got my education until the third class in Kandahar, and then moved up with my father to Kabul -- who was a Member of Parliament of Afghanistan at that time -- and did the rest of my education in Kabul. By Afghan standards, we were a very well off family. The kind of life we had and also other Afghans had was really too good for the countries around us -- big homes and lots of fun. In Kabul, of course, life was very good. We had as much access to good music and movies -- which at that age people really want -- as any kid would have in Europe or America, and a good education, a fairly good life.

What kind of student were you? What kind of future did you see for yourself?

Hamid Karzai: I was a serious, quiet student. I think I partially wanted to do the kind of parliamentary stuff that my father was doing, and I was also interested in the University of Kabul, which at that time was a very prestigious institution. The professors there were very well respected and they had very nice lives. The environment of the university was so enchanting. That was the kind of life I wanted.

Were there books that were important to you growing up?

Hamid Karzai: Yes, yes. At one stage, within class nine and ten, I was very science oriented. I was doing very good in chemistry, and I went towards books about the evolution of mankind. Studies of Darwin and what that theory was. I did too much of that. Kept reading it, kept reading it. I got into trouble with my professor of chemistry, because there were things that I knew he didn't know, and he really got mad at me one day in the classroom.

As a student I was interested in Russian writers, like Anton Chekhov and Dostoyevsky, and also the English writers, Charles Dickens, and Afghan writers and history. A lot of Iranian printed material would come to Afghanistan in those days, magazines and lots of things.

Who were your role models back then? What person particularly inspired you?

Hamid Karzai: When I was growing up, Henry Kissinger was a name that was mentioned a lot. When I was growing up, Kennedy was just assassinated. I was seven or eight years of age at that time. When I became an adult and began to know the world more, Gandhi was somebody that I admired very much, and Mandela. He's still around, a magnificent man. Martin Luther King is somebody that came very often to my mind and was discussed in some circles.

But I'm most affected by Gandhi. The struggle for independence of his country and the way he did it through peaceful means: non-violence, and the tolerance that he preached. and the way he respected mankind as a whole, and his self-restraint. A wonderful human being.

You did some studying in India?

Hamid Karzai: Yes. That was from 1976 to '82. Six wonderful years.

You followed in your father's footsteps, going into public service and government, so he also must have been an important model for you.

Hamid Karzai: Yes, of course. His parliamentary elections, his conduct with the tribes. We are a tribal people, and the way his house would be open to people all the time was something that came automatically. And his love for peace. He hated violence. That was something that I admired in him a lot. He hated guns very much.

What experiences had a profound effect on you growing up?

Hamid Karzai: Well,

I had, in Afghan standards, a very well-to-do childhood. I had horses, huge houses, and my schools, but a very restricted childhood. We were not allowed too much of a luxury that other people my age had, in terms of association with other people. So in that way, we were -- I recognized when I went to India, when I mixed up with other students there, that I was very reserved, very, very reserved, and that was a handicap. I could not associate easily with people. But on the other hand, it had benefits of self-restraint and, you know, a level of respect to other people, trying to make sure that nobody was offended, and respect to others.

When the Soviets came, how did your family experience that?

Hamid Karzai: Like other Afghans experienced it. We did no worse. We did no better. My father was taken to prison. A lot of our relatives were killed by the communists and the Soviets in a brutal way. So were the relatives and fathers of a lot of other Afghan children at that time. It was the same all over the country. It was a horrible thing.

In 1979, one morning when I was going to my university -- I was studying in Northern India in Simla -- I saw the newspapers in the morning, and the newspapers said that the Soviet Union has invaded Afghanistan. My feeling at that moment suddenly was of a loss. I felt smaller. Much, much smaller than I felt before that when I was walking to my college. I heard people talk about this invasion and suddenly I felt a loss of identity. Who am I? Do I have a country? Do I have a name? Do I have an identity? I said, "No, I don't. I don't have a country. My country is taken over. Let's do something about it."

After a few days...

I took a bus as a student and went something like 3,000 kilometers to the eastern border of Afghanistan and I saw the first batch of refugees there, refugees that had left Afghanistan as a result of the Soviet invasion. The situation they were in, but the pride that they had! I was 18 or 17 when I left the country to study abroad, but the rest of Asia doesn't really know what the character of the society is, how other people are. I had some money with me. It was my stipend money that my mother had sent me. I handed out some of that money to one of my fellow Afghans who was a refugee. He was insulted. He said, "What do you think of me?" I said, "I'm trying to help." He said, "No. Don't help by handing me some money. If you really want to help, you help the whole of Afghanistan. Help me go back home."

This was a remarkable thing to hear, "Help me go back home." I stayed a few days there. I came back to India. I had a year and a half to complete my graduate years. I did that, and the moment I finished that I remembered the words that the man had told me. "Help me go home."

I came to Afghanistan to fight against the Soviet Union. We won. The Soviets left. The Mujahideen, as they were called at the time, took power. I was appointed the Deputy Foreign Minister of the country. War began again. Robbery began. Interventions from neighbors began. The country went from one disaster to another..

In the nine or so years that I was in the resistance fighting against the Soviets, there were a group of people that were called the Taliban. They were people who were alongside the forces fighting the Soviets. I knew them personally. They were good people. They were honest people. They were very true to the spirit of jihad and the fight against the Soviets.

When the country went to anarchy at the hands of various warlords and commanders, one of these people came to me and said, "Hamid, we were friends when we were fighting the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Look at this country. What happened to this country? War everywhere, anarchy, looting, insults to women, insults to the sovereignty of this country. Can we do something about it?" I said, "Sure. But how?" He said, "Let's get together and get rid of these commanders and make the country all right." I said, "Fine." That is how this process of the Taliban began. Now, I did not know at that stage that there were other forces behind us, with other intentions..

The Taliban movement began. Then they took over the country. I associated with it for about a year, because I knew them very well. After a year signs emerged day by day that this movement was neither an Afghan movement, nor a movement for peace in Afghanistan, nor a movement for peace actually anywhere in the world. But this is a movement that is going to bring disaster to Afghanistan and to the rest of the world. This was recognized at the end of 1995. The Taliban emerged in 1994. I was appointed Ambassador by the Taliban in mid-1996 to the United Nations. This is when they took Kabul. I refused to accept that appointment. When they asked me why, I told them, "Because you are giving sanctuary to terrorists."

So you supported the Taliban initially. Can you tell us more about that?

Hamid Karzai: I supported the Taliban, because I had seen them -- when we were fighting with the Soviets -- as different people, as good people. They were very fine people. When Afghanistan faced that kind of anarchy, warlordism, and all that, when they came to ask me for support, I said, "Let's go and get rid of these warlords." Everybody did that. The U.S. supported them. The UN supported them, and they were good people Very soon, they were taken over by foreigners, by the Pakistanis, by the Arab elements, by radical Muslims, radical extremist elements from all over the world, and then terrorists mixed up with them. So the movement was completely sabotaged. The good ones in it were somehow sidelined or assassinated or killed or made to sit at home, and the bad ones kept rising and rising and rising. That's how this movement that could have been a good one, that could have been one that could bring peace, turned into a killing machine, turned into an instrument of terror and torture for Afghans. I began to sense that within eight months of them coming to Afghanistan, and I began to speak to people about that. Nobody believed me.

But you had supplied them. That must have felt terrible after you realized things had gone wrong.

Hamid Karzai: I gave them the money that I had, and they were given money from outside. Very soon, I recognized that the forces with the movement that were friendly toward me were getting poorer and poorer. The others were getting richer and richer. By '95, I knew that this movement was horrible, a terrible movement.

Osama Bin Laden had just arrived in Afghanistan at that time. I had just heard his name at that time. Somebody in Afghanistan, a pilot, told me that he flew this man from a certain border of Afghanistan to Kandahar to meet with Mullah Omar with two sacks of money in his hands, briefcases of money. But the Taliban were banning people from education, banning women from work. The world did not know them the way he knew them at the time. The world was still sympathetic to them, the West in particular. I began to disassociate with them. I began to travel to America. I began to travel to Europe to tell the Europeans and the Americans that Afghanistan is going through very difficult times; that there is a danger in Afghanistan for Afghans and for the rest of the world. Very few people believed me. They said, "This is not true. You are saying this because they are not the type of people you are. They represent Afghanistan; you represent another culture. You speak English, you are educated, so you don't represent Afghanistan. The Taliban do represent Afghanistan." We began in Afghanistan a campaign against them, a campaign to dislodge them, without help from the rest of the world.

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.

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.

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.

Now what, Chairman? You have your work cut out for you. We are looking historically at a Grand Council meeting a few days from now, in which you're very likely to be named the interim president of your country. Talk about this moment in history for your country.

Hamid Karzai: I'm very optimistic. I'm sure Afghanistan will do very well, because the Afghan people are so adamant to make it good for them. I have seen that a hundred times. I have not seen any Afghan coming to me for help for his daily life. I've had Afghans come to me for peace, for security, for dignity, for progress.

When I was in Tehran, visiting Iran officially, we were in a kind of cultural event. Some young Afghans who are students in Iran approached me -- boys and girls -- they wanted to see me. And I said, "All right." It was about five in the afternoon, and I said, "I can see you at 9:30 today in my residence," and the residence was far away from the city, and students are always poor, but they came there. They came to that residence. The Iranian foreign minister came, and he was there until about 11 o'clock. So by 11:30, I managed to meet that group of young Afghan students, boys and girls. When they came, I turned to the girls, and I said, "I'm sorry, ladies, that I could not meet you at the time that I promised, and it's so late at night, and you have to go back. I don't know how far you'll have to go back." There was a girl, 15 or 16 years of age, and she spoke. She said, "Oh, no, no, Mr. Chairman. We don't mind. We could wait for days and days for you to talk to us, because the country has regained respect, because the country has respect now." And I was shocked to hear that from a girl that was probably born in Iran, because most people that left Afghanistan left about 25 years ago. She must have been born in Iran and raised in Iran. She was aware of so much of her Afghan identity. She was only happy that the country had regained respect and dignity. So this quest for dignity, this quest for respect, this quest for the identity of Afghanistan is so strong in Afghans that they will not allow this country to go back the way it was.

We've seen from images on television and from reading about it in newspapers that there's tremendous poverty and devastation in Afghanistan today. Obviously you have huge hurdles ahead of you, yet you seem very confident. Do you feel you're on the right path?

Hamid Karzai: I think so, very much, because...

Wherever I go in Afghanistan, I have this feeling, wherever I go. Even when I went to a northern province some three months ago, when there was an earthquake, an earthquake that had totally destroyed the northern part of a town, completely, even then, at that time, when I asked people, "What more can I do for you?" nobody responded. And I said again to them, about 4,400 of them, I said again, "What more can I do for you?" Nobody responded. And then the third time, when I insisted, somebody got up and said, "Nothing for our daily life," or nothing to ameliorate our present situation, "But the future. We want the future to be all right." That was very important.

At the same place, when I was in the middle of this destruction, a group of people came to me and said, "Mr. Karzai, if you want to send us tents or food or medicine, fine. If you don't want to send us, also fine. But what we need from you is not to worry about the earthquake or our children and the rubble. What we want from you is to get rid of the warlords. Remove the warlords from our lives. This is what we want. Forget about the earthquake or destruction to our lives and property or the death of our children." Imagine what the society had gone through if they did not care about the earthquake and the children and the rubble. They wanted to free themselves from warlords. So there's enthusiasm.

You talked before about what it feels like to see children going back to school.

Hamid Karzai: Yes, a great feeling, a wonderful feeling.

Sometimes when I have functions to attend in the city, or I go to a hotel to attend a function, or this or that, or I go to lunch in an electricity project or something, and I come back, and I see children going to school. At about 11 o'clock they return from school, or earlier, if I have to go at 7 o'clock, they go to school. It's the best sight for me. I spend the whole day very happy that day when I see the Afghan children going to school. It's remarkable, and I especially like it when they recognize me, and they wave, and they say hello, and they run up to the car. It's wonderful. It's just wonderful. The sight of Afghan children going to school is the most pleasing thing that I can have.

There has still been some fighting in Afghanistan. Do you feel like you have the support to bring everyone together and make this a cohesive society?

Hamid Karzai: Oh a lot of it, yes. Mainly because the common man, in Afghanistan wants it so strongly, and the warlords know that very well, and also because of the presence of the international forces and the attention of the world. The warlords know that a combination of Afghanistan and the international community would make it difficult for them to misbehave.

Why are there people who hate the U.S. so much, Chairman?

Hamid Karzai: Not in Afghanistan. No, the U.S. is seen as a liberator. They think that America has liberated them, that America has brought a good life, a new life, to them. They feel much safer with American troops around. It's an irony for a nation that has fought foreign troops for centuries, defeated the British, defeated the Soviets, and now the Americans they see as liberators, because Americans and the allied forces really came to liberate Afghanistan from a tremendous horror, the horror of terrorism.

One day we were having dinner with some guests and there was an elderly man sitting there with us. His name is Aziz Agha Aziz Agha is a man who had lost eight of his children and grandchildren to one of the accidental American bombs. The planes were chasing the Taliban. The Taliban moved into a house and the plane went and bombed that house. That was a civilian house. The whole family was destroyed and eight children were killed. Only this grandfather remained alive.

Aziz Agha was sitting with me there, having dinner with me. That was the first time that the American Special Forces came to Tirin Kot. My secretary, he came in and said, "The Americans that have arrived last night, two of them want to see you." They were very nice men. One of them was called Gregg and the other was Jason, Captain Jason. He was wounded by the same accidental bomb that we received later on. I said, "Bring them in." When they came in and they sat, I suddenly noticed that the man who family was killed by the American bombing was also here. I felt embarrassed. I did not know what to do. I thought this man might misbehave or say something that would not be good.

This man said, "Hamid, are these Americans?" He said, "Tell them that I have lost eight of my children at one of your accidental bombs, but I don't care. Even if I lost more of my people, of my children, I wouldn't care; I would accept it because you are here to liberate Afghanistan." Now that remark, for me, for a man to accept the loss of his grandchildren and say that he is willing to accept more losses because the country is going to be liberated, was the highest form of legitimacy in the endeavor, in the struggle against terrorism in Afghanistan, that the Afghan people wanted to be liberated by whatever means, even if they lost their families.

From that point onwards, the force with which we moved against the Taliban and the way the terrorists ran away, was most remarkable. We came to Kandahar in peace. We went to Kabul and started the Afghan government. As the head of the Afghan government, I began to receive people. Almost all of them, the majority of them, say they want more international security forces, more ISOF forces, more allied forces to fight against these people.

They never ask me for food. They never ask me for help for their daily lives. They always ask for help for the future, for the future of Afghanistan. That is what we are concentrating on, a good future for the Afghan people. And that future has begun with our children going to school. For me, the happiest moments of my life are when I go out in the morning sometimes, some places and I see children going to school. That has been possible because of the help that America gave, because of the help the international community gave, and I thank you very much for that.

Does the phrase, American Dream, have resonance for them?

Hamid Karzai: Not for us in Afghanistan, the way it is in America. For Afghans, it's an Afghan dream.

What's the Afghan dream?

Hamid Karzai: To have a good country, a respectable country, a nice country. I was told the other day by a gentleman that the National Democratic Institute in America -- NDI -- had done a survey in Afghanistan among the common Afghan people as to what was their biggest happiness in the past six months, and almost all Afghans told them the return of Afghan dignity. So that's the Afghan dream.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It was a great honor to talk to you.

Thank you very much.