Steely will beneath the suave exterior

The reins of power in Afghanistan are now in the hands of a man who could hardly be more different from the Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar. Where the latter was poorly schooled and is reported to have hardly ever met a non-Muslim, Hamid Karzai is highly educated, nattily dressed, Westernised and fluent in English.

When the Taliban erupted on to Afghanistan's political scene in the early 1990s, Karzai – who in 1992 acted as deputy foreign minister to the mujahedin-backed government of Burhanuddin Rabbani, at first supported them. They are reported to have offered him the post of ambassador to the United Nations.

But by 1994 he had become alienated, accusing the Taliban of acting as a vehicle for Pakistani intelligence services and various Arab groups who were treating the country as a kind of laboratory for their own idiosyncratic version of fundamentalist Islam. "These Arabs are in Afghanistan to learn to shoot," he complained. "They learn to shoot on live targets and those live targets are the Afghan people, our children our women. We want them out."

His hostility was hardened by the fact that the Taliban almost certainly had a hand in the death of his father, Abdul Ahad Karzai, who was shot dead after returning from a mosque in Peshawar, Pakistan, two years ago.

His main qualifying criterion for becoming leader is that he is drawn from the Pashtun community, the largest ethnic group in the country and one whose support is essential to the future security of any future non-Taliban government. Moreover, he comes from Kandahar, the Taliban's political stronghold.

As a member of the same Popalzoi clan as the exiled 87-year-old king, Zahir Shah, he retains close ties to the monarchists, whose interests the West wants to see included in any broad-based government in Kabul. His grandfather was Abdul Ahad Karzai, a former president of the national council under King Zahir before the monarch was deposed in 1973.

Some Afghans will be deeply suspicious of a man who spent most of the 1980s in the United States, where his family owns several restaurants in Boston, San Francisco and Chicago.

But his courage and fighting spiritare not in question. A month after the 11 September bombings, he left his home in Quetta, Pakistan, and slipped into Afghanistan on a mission to gather support for a loya jirga (council of tribal leaders). Surviving desperate attempts by the Taliban to capture him, he led an assault by 4,000 soldiers on his home city.