Afghanistan’s Karzai gave up the presidency, but not the power - washingtonpost

KABUL — Two days before his presidential tenure ended last September, Hamid Karzai delivered farewell remarks to a group of foreign diplomats. With his trademark flair, he began by thanking them for helping Afghanistan, and by the end he was reciting lines from a Robert Frost poem.

In between, he declared that he would remain in the “service” of his successor, Ashraf Ghani, as well as Abdullah Abdullah, Ghani’s partner in the coalition government, according to an official transcript. The country’s first peaceful transfer of power, Karzai continued, would be his “legacy.”

“Definitely, as a citizen of this country, I will be fully in support of the new arrangement, the new president and the chief executive, and will do all I can but very quietly,” he told the gathering. - Read More

Afghanistan’s Karzai gave up the presidency, but not the
power

Ex-Afghan president Karzai and aides question US-backed government and its allies