Karzai is good at keeping a cool head in extreme circumstances. He describes himself as "a politician, not a fighter." Educated partly in India, he speaks English fluently, as well as six other languages. Over his Afghan tunic he often wears a double-breasted blazer. After two sessions with the Taliban commanders, he secured the surrender of Kandahar, a city Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar once promised his fighters would defend to the death.

According to Afghanland.com sources, Karzai has six brothers and one sister have built successful careers in business or academia in the U.S. Two Maryland-based brothers own Afghan restaurants in Boston, San Francisco and Baltimore Maryland owned by Pat and Qayum Karzai. All three restaurants are named Helmand, after the province just west of Kandahar. Though he has visited the U.S. several times, on occasion meeting with high-ranking cia, State Department and other government officials, Karzai has remained mostly in Afghanistan or in exile in Pakistan, embroiled in the tortured politics of his homeland.

Unlike most Afghan men, who marry in their early 20s, Karzai remained a bachelor 1999. Having a wife was not a priority to him, He was only dedicated to Afghanistan.Family members say it was the final illness of his mother, who had expressed the wish to see him settled before she died, that led Karzai to marry at last, in January 1999. His wife Zinat is an obstetrician-gynecologist active in assisting refugees in Pakistan.

After the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Karzai fled to Pakistan, where he built supply lines between anti-Soviet Afghan guerrillas and American backers. When the mujahedin took power in 1992, he returned to serve for two years as Deputy Foreign Minister in the government of President Burhanuddin Rabbani. Disillusionment with the infighting of that regime led him to switch over, briefly, to the Taliban, which once tried to make him its U.N. ambassador, a post he declined. But Karzai, an Islamic moderate, soon turned against the Taliban's stringencies, especially its brutal restrictions on women, and returned to Pakistan. Former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Karl Inderfurth, a friend of Karzai's, says that after the murder of his father, Karzai approached Washington with plans for leading resistance to the Taliban. "It did seem like a mission impossible," says Inderfurth, "because he'd be putting himself at great risk."

Karzai has never shied from risks. On Oct. 7 he slipped inside southern Afghanistan, heading first to his ancestral village of Karz, near Kandahar. From there he set off to the mountains of Oruzgan province, recruiting tribal elders to join an anti-Taliban coalition. It was not long before the Taliban got on his trail. He escaped ambush and certain death by calling in U.S. forces to rescue him by helicopter. The U.S. says it whisked him out of the country; he insists he never left--perhaps concerned about being seen as too close to the U.S. Since then, Karzai has been back in the mountains, while his Pashtun recruitment drive has picked up speed as one Taliban city after another has fallen to the Northern Alliance.

Having secured the peaceful fall of Kandahar, Karzai is headed up to the capital, Kabul. When he formally took charge on Dec. 22 2001 he will find his 30-member Cabinet assailed by regional warlords who were elbowed out in Bonn.

One notable element of Karzai's Cabinet is that it will include two women. Suhaila Seddiqi, a doctor in Kabul, will be the Minister of Public Health. Sima Samar, who works with a nongovernmental organization in Quetta, will be Minister of Women's Affairs, as well as one of Karzai's five deputies.

He is considered a moderate Muslim. In the campaign against the Taliban, he commanded 4,000 Northern Alliance fighters, mostly in southern Afghanistan, in the push on Kandahar.