Hamid Karzai

Electoral officials today canceled Saturday's planned Afghan presidential runoff and declared incumbent Hamid Karzai the victor. The decision, announced by the government-appointed Independent Electoral Commission, ended more than two months of uncertainty stemming from an election that was marred by massive fraud. The U.S. and the United Nations quickly lined up in support of Karzai, who is to serve another five-year term. "We congratulate President Karzai on his victory in this historic election and look forward to working with him," the U.S. Embassy said in statement.

WASHINGTON — Osama bin Laden was devising a strategy for overthrowing Afghan President Hamid Karzai and controlling Afghanistan once the U.S. left the country, said a former U.S. official familiar with the cache of notes and letters that were seized last year in the raid on the terrorist leader's compound. Bin Laden had discussed his plans with the Taliban leadership council, known as the Quetta Shura, and the Haqqani network, which controls the North Waziristan tribal area in Pakistan, said the former official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity while discussing the intelligence.

Hamid Karzai begins another term as Afghanistan's president with a long to-do list. The Obama administration has made clear to him that he must crack down on corruption, install a team of technocrats to run the country and weed out warlords and narco-traffickers. Those are all important priorities, but there is something else he should be doing as well: acting as a wartime leader. So far, Karzai has been oddly disengaged from the war raging around him. Rarely if ever does he visit his own troops in the field, go to hospitals to comfort the wounded or honor the dead, as President Obama did so stirringly with his recent middle-of-the-night visit to Dover Air Force Base.

KABUL, Afghanistan — President Hamid Karzai suggested Thursday that a speeded-up departure of Western troops is the only way to prevent a recurrence of "painful experiences" such as the sight of American soldiers posing with the body parts of dead insurgents. In a statement issued by the Afghan presidential palace 24 hours after the Los Angeles Times published photos showing U.S. troops with the remains of suicide bombers and mugging for the camera, Karzai called the behavior depicted "inhumane and provocative.

New Afghan leader Hamid Karzai received the blessing of the country's exiled former king Tuesday and said he is determined to "fight terrorism to the end" and revive the war-wrecked economy. As if to underscore the importance of the moment, the 87-year-old king, Mohammad Zaher Shah, stepped outside his heavily guarded Roman villa for a rare appearance before reporters.

President Hamid Karzai extended his lead over his top challenger in Afghanistan's presidential election, new vote results showed Wednesday, but remains short of the 50% threshold that would allow him to avoid a two-man runoff. Afghan election officials are slowly releasing results from last week's presidential election, and final certified results will not be ready until at least mid-September, after dozens of serious complaints of fraud have been investigated. Low turnout and the fraud allegations have cast a pall over the vote, seen as crucial to efforts to stabilize the country, which is racked by Taliban insurgents and doubts over its fragile democracy.

Afghans in the region had a mixed response Wednesday to the announcement that an urbane 43-year-old Pushtun tribal chief, Hamid Karzai, had been named to lead their nation's interim government. Here in Quetta, Karzai's home for much of the past two decades, residents were mainly enthusiastic about his selection by four Afghan factions meeting in Germany.

Supported by 18,000 U.S. soldiers and billions of dollars in aid, Afghanistan's interim government depends like few in the world on the United States. This week, the Bush administration is showing that it is happy to accept a little help in return.

A gunman tried unsuccessfully to kill President Hamid Karzai on Thursday and was shot to death by the Afghan leader's U.S. military bodyguards, just hours after two explosions in a crowded downtown Kabul market area killed at least 24 people. Officials said they did not know whether the assassination attempt in the southern city of Kandahar and the explosions here in the capital were related.

Human rights groups and some Afghan lawmakers criticized President Hamid Karzai on Thursday for signing into law legislation that some believe legalizes the rape of a wife by her husband and prevents women from leaving the house without a man's permission. Critics say the law undermines hard-won rights for women enacted after the fall of the Taliban regime.

Afghanistan's  ambassador to the United States defended his president's harsh comments about America, saying that Hamid Karzai was only reflecting the sentiments of his public, "as any legitimate president would do. " (see video below) Eklil Hakimi, appearing on CNN on Sunday, was reacting to Karzai's comments that Americans "are demons," and that the alleged killing of 16 unarmed Afghans by a U.S. soldier was "not the first incident, it was the 100th, the 200th and 500th incident.

On a day when President Obama personally apologized for the burning of Korans at an American-run military base, violence over the incident escalated ominously with the killing of two American troops by an Afghan army soldier during a demonstration in eastern Afghanistan. At least 13 people have been reported killed in unrest that broke out after Afghan laborers at the Bagram air base discovered late Monday that discarded Korans were being disposed of in the incinerator used to burn trash.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Thursday sought to secure help from Pakistani leaders in facilitating peace talks with Pakistan-based Afghan Taliban leaders, while the militant group denied any interest in negotiating with an "impotent" administration. Karzai's visit to Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, came amid reports that he had said in an interview that the U.S. and Afghan governments had begun secret talks with the Afghan Taliban. In recent months, U.S. officials have been meeting with Taliban envoys to discuss the establishment of a Taliban office in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar.

  On the face of it, President Hamid Karzai has every motive to do all he can to bring about talks with the Taliban. Instead, the Afghan leader is emerging as a prime impediment to urgent U.S. efforts to jump-start negotiations with the insurgents. Since the start of his second term in office, Karzai has repeatedly declared that his top priority is finding a political settlement to the bloody Afghan conflict and bringing the "disaffected brothers" back into the social and political fold.

The wartime alliance between Afghanistan and the United States in the last decade has been fraught with suspicions over sharply differing goals and tactics. It is becoming clear that any postwar partnership to prevent a Taliban comeback is likely to be just as problematic. Despite compelling common interests, stark differences already have emerged between Washington and the Afghan government about the military landscape after 2014, when most U.S. combat troops are gone and Afghan security forces are in charge of keeping the country safe.

A U.S. general responsible for training Afghanistan's security forces has been relieved of his duties for criticizing Afghan President Hamid Karzai and saying the country's leaders were "isolated from reality. " Maj. Gen. Peter Fuller, deputy commander of NATO's training mission in Afghanistan, made the comments in an interview posted Thursday on the website Politico. A day later, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John Allen, released a statement saying Fuller had been relieved of his assignment.

The dilapidated soccer stadium, a onetime Taliban execution ground, rang today with excited shouts of "Karzai! Kar-ZAI!" The chants weren't a signal of support for Afghanistan's beleaguered president. Far from it. They were the raucous response to a shouted question -- "Who's the one who failed at governing?" -- from a speaker warming up the crowd for Hamid Karzai's principal rival, Abdullah Abdullah. When the presidential campaign began two months ago, Karzai looked like the hands-down favorite to win a second five-year term.

Re "Can the U.S. teach Hamid Karzai how to be a wartime president?," Opinion, Nov. 10 I always suspected that "Max Boot" was really the nom de plume of some comedy writer. In Tuesday's Times, he finally confirmed my suspicions. Boot suggests that President Obama send former President George W. Bush to Afghanistan to teach Hamid Karzai "how to be a leader in wartime." I don't need to explain why that's funny, do I? Robert Von Bargen Santa Monica :: The headline on this column should have read: "Can Karzai teach Obama how to be a wartime president?"

Parsing statements by President Hamid Karzai has become something of a parlor game in the Afghan capital. The Afghan leader's office sought Monday to distance him from his controversial remarks in a weekend television interview, in which he asserted that Afghanistan would side with Pakistan in a hypothetical war against the United States. The presidential palace said Karzai's comments to Pakistan's Geo TV, aired Saturday, had been misinterpreted. The remarks came toward the end of a lengthy interview conducted in English and Urdu, in which the Afghan leader repeatedly urged Pakistan to move against Islamic militants who take refuge on its soil, according to a transcript released by Karzai's office.

For a beleaguered and increasingly isolated Afghan President Hamid Karzai, revelations of an alleged assassination plot hatched in Pakistan and involving one of his own bodyguards are another blow to the prospects for a deal to end the Afghan war. The Afghan government's accusation of a Pakistani link in the alleged assassination plot against the Afghan leader adds new tensions to a cross-border relationship already on edge. Lutfullah Mashal, a spokesman for Afghanistan's main intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security, said the ringleaders of the assassination plot, an Egyptian and a Bangladeshi, were based in Pakistan's tribal areas.