Hamid Karzai is back in the thick of Afghan politics but a long way from power.
The day the Taliban swept into Kabul, former president Hamid Karzai, who had spent much of the past two decades atop a government that was now in the midst of collapsing, called Abdullah Abdullah, another veteran survivor of Afghanistan’s game of thrones.
Karzai, who lives in a compound near the grounds of the presidential palace, had bombshell news: President Ashraf Ghani had just fled the country. And he had a question for a man who once had been his chief rival: Would Abdullah stay or go?
“He asked me two or three times,” Abdullah recalled. “We were back and forth on the telephone. And then he [asked] if the two of us could be together? I said, ‘That’s a good idea.’ ”
The two men stayed in Kabul after the Taliban seized power, formed a new council, and have pressed their former enemies to build a government that includes a wide swath of the Afghan ethnic and political scene, including women. This was not without risk. The last time the Taliban ousted a government, in 1996, they tortured the president, Mohammad Najibullah, killed him and hung his body from a traffic light post.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/09/02/afghanistan-karzai-taliban-government-power/