Afghanistan president Hamid Karzai

Hamid Karzai was born in Kandahar. As an ethnic Pashtun of the influential Popalzai clan, he came from a family that were among the strongest supporters of King Zahir Shah. He took a postgraduate course in political science at Himachal University in Shimla, Himachal Pradesh, India from 1979 to 1983, then returned to work as a fund-raiser supporting anti-Soviet uprisings in Pakistan during the Soviet intervention for the rest of the 1980s. After the fall of Najibullah's government in 1992, he served as a deputy foreign minister in the government of Burhanuddin Rabbani. He is married to Zinat Karzai, an obstetrician by profession. They were married in 1998 and have no children. ... When the Taliban emerged onto the political scene in the 1990s, Karzai was initially among their supporters. However, as with many other early Taliban supporters, he broke with the Taliban, citing distrust of their links to Pakistan. After the Taliban drove Rabbani out of Kabul in 1996, Karzai refused to serve as their U.N. ambassador. In 1997, Karzai joined many of his family members in the United States, from where he worked to reinstate Zahir Shah. His father was assassinated, presumably by Taliban agents, on July 14, 1999, and Karzai swore revenge against the Taliban by working to help overthrow them.