The Rise of Hamid Karzai: From Motorcycle to Power - Political Biography & Afghan Leadership History | Perfect for History Buffs & Political Science Students

Dutch journalist Bette Dam lived in Afghanistan for the last seven years. This book - her first big project in Afghanistan - covers Karzai's rise to power and explains where the new government headed by president Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai and Chief Executive Officer Abdullah Abdullah picks up.This book available first in Dutch and quickly sold out. With the translation in English, Bette Dam's vivid and accurate portrait of Hamed Karzai and his society becomes available again and to a wider audience.The book tells the gripping adventure of Hamid Karzai, a middle-aged former diplomat throwing himself into a seemingly hopeless tribal uprising against the Taliban in late 2001. Dam traces the important people in this enterprise from the relative obscurity in Afghanistan's poorest province to the inner circle of the Chairman of the Interim Authority and later President Karzai. The book remains an easy read despite the complexities and large cast of characters.Much of the bewilderment surrounding President Karzai's "mood swings" is rooted in a profound misunderstanding of his background by the journalists or politicians dealing with him. In the eyes of many interlocutors, Karzai was primarily the diplomat and exiled politician they remembered from the 1990s. Dam sheds light on the mechanics that kept Karzai alive in 2001, and propelled him towards a leadership position. Without knowing the debt towards "his men of the first hour" interlocutors later could not understand his attachment to figures such as Jan Muhammad Khan. The rivalries inside Uruzgan masterfully depicted by Dam go a long way towards explaining the alienation of the Taliban in 2002-03 from the new government. A recent book by Anand Gopal portrays some of these developments, too.This complex story is primarily based on interviews. Dam never pressures her interview partners, lets them describe events as they remember them. As a result we now have access in English to a remarkable bit of oral history documentation with unique first-hand sources on some defining moments of the "war on terror" in Afghanistan, which shaped developments for the years to come and go a long way to explain subsequent events. This is a required balance to accounts telling the story of the first years of the war on terror in Afghanistan from the Washington side (Franks, Woodward, Gates), as well as for the functioning of the government of President Karzai in Kabul until 2014.