Do we like them?

Do we like Hamid Karzai?

Our score: 4 out of 10. Real good (staying in Kabul in 2021, pressing for girls' schooling) sits next to a 2009 family law that hurt women and long-running corruption and election-fraud claims.

Karzai is the former president who was running Afghanistan when the West was still backing it, and he was seeking re-election in 2009 with 55 per cent in the preliminary count. He was the man Washington needed, then the man Washington fell out with. He's now one of the few figures from that era still living in Kabul under Taliban rule.

The ugliest moment on the record is the 2009 Shia family law. Rights campaigners said it restricted Shia women, including husbands being able to withhold food from wives who refused sex and wives needing permission to work. Karzai signed it in March, suspended it for a review, then published a modestly changed version in July, days before the election, while courting Shia clerics. The Feminist Majority Foundation said provisions it objected to stayed in.

Then there's the integrity question. After the 2009 vote, EU monitors reported allegedly suspicious ballots, about 1.5 million, 1.1 million of them for Karzai. In 2010 the New York Times, as relayed by CBS, reported an aide at the centre of a corruption investigation was on the CIA payroll, arrested then released through Karzai's intervention. An independent audit later found nearly $900 million in fraud at Kabul Bank; it did not name Karzai, though the bank reportedly gave millions to a candidate's campaign.

On the harm test, there's no record of him campaigning against anyone's rights, and nothing on LGBTQ+ issues turned up, which is a gap rather than a pass. On women, the 2009 law is a real mark, but he has since pushed the other way, warning that the girls' school ban sets Afghanistan back. His line on the Taliban is that the world must engage with them, and where you land on that depends on whether you read it as pragmatism or as going soft on a regime that shuts women out.

He told the AP the Taliban did not take Kabul but were invited to protect people, and that he turned down an offer from Ghani's protection unit to take over the presidency. He says he had no legal right to it. Critics read that as cosying up to the Taliban; he frames it as keeping the capital from chaos.

He told NPR he stayed in Kabul and said he fears for his safety, though not from the Taliban. He said “The Taliban are Afghans. They belong to this country.” He also said girls being kept out of school is a disaster for Afghanistan's future, and he has said he's free to move within Kabul but not to leave. That's a consistent line for someone who could have fled.