I would like to begin by thanking everyone who has waited so patiently here this afternoon. We greatly underestimated Mr. President, the number of people who wished to come see and hear you this afternoon and that is why you found such a large crowd waiting on the grass. They, I hope, are able to hear what is being said in here � speakers have been erected to make that possible. It is a great privilege for St. Antony's to welcome Mr. Hamid Karzai at our college this afternoon. His Excellency, the President, is on a brief visit to this country as part of an extensive journey and I understand, Mr. President, your main purpose is to seek resources for the reconstruction and development of your country. President Karzai was born in 1957, which must make him one of the youngest heads of state in the world. He fought in the Jihad against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and became deputy foreign minister in one of the governments formed after the Soviet withdrawal. He subsequently became the unofficial representative of the former King Zahir Shah and established his office in Quetta in Pakistan. The events of the eleventh of September 2001 and subsequent hostilities in Afghanistan brought His Excellency, the President, back into Afghanistan, where he played a leading role in building support for return of the former king, Zahir Shah, to his country. Mr. Karzai became leader of the interim administration formed in December 2001 and after the loya jirga of June 2002, he was elected as president of the transitional administration in Afghanistan. I think all of us can remember the enormous relief that we felt, that we friends of Afghanistan felt, when that result was achieved and Hamid Karzai became the head of the interim administration. For more than eighteen months, your face has been recognized throughout the world as the face of hope for the reconstitution of Afghanistan as a state at peace with itself and with the capacity to ensure liberty, security and justice for its citizens. We've also watched, sometimes with anguish, your search for support from the international community for the resources you need to achieve that objective of establishing a new, free, just and secure Afghanistan. You can rely on this audience, Mr. President, to listen very attentively to what you have to tell us and to spread the word in Oxford and more widely in the United Kingdom. Mr. President, it's my great honour to invite you to address us.

Thank you very much. Bismillah al-Rahman al-Rahim. Ladies and Gentlemen, it is such a tremendously great honour for me to be at this centre of learning, at Oxford, at St. Antony's College. All the students in the universities all over the world wish to be studying in Oxford or Cambridge. And I was no exception. But, of course, all people are not as lucky as you are who are studying or teaching here. When I was coming to London, I thought well, what place would I like to be if I am in the United Kingdom? The first place in my mind was to come to Oxford. My first plan was not to speak; my first plan was just to go around and see the University and feel like a student, sit around the cafeterias and enjoy myself. I am also somehow, I should say, very much fond of the British countryside, the green fields, the trees. God is very kind to you, by the way, he gives you plenty of rain to have all that.

[Laughter]

We do not have all that. And I wonder why people would live in the cities if you are in the United Kingdom, but this is a choice they make, so we should have nothing to say about that. So I am very happy to be here. Very glad to be standing here in front of you and to have the honour to talk to you.

I was thinking, what am I to speak about? And I think there is no better theme for us to talk about than what happened to Afghanistan. What did history do to us, what did the makers of history do to us, how did Afghanistan react to the events of the past 30 years? Was Afghanistan a radical country? Was Afghanistan a religiously extremist society? I will tell you a story about Afghanistan and in telling you the story of Afghanistan, you will find out the nature of our society and the nature of politics around us. And eventually you will find out what terrorism was, where it emerged, what caused it. Afghanistan began to face the difficulties of the past 30 years with the coup launched by the Communist Party of Afghanistan backed by the Soviets in 1978.

People like myself in my age group were at the time in either the first year of college or the second year of college. Subsequently, a year later the Soviet Union invaded our country. And with that invasion began the war against the Soviets for the liberation of Afghanistan. The Soviets were there to superimpose a value system on the Afghan people, which was alien to us. Communism, the way of life they wanted in the Soviet Union � very much unwanted in Afghanistan. And in order to do that, they not only tried to change the regime, but they tried to force people, kill people, torture people, uproot people from their homes and societies in order to bring Communism. So the Afghan people reacted by waging a struggle against it by choosing to leave the country, going to Pakistan in millions, going to Iran in millions and some of them, those who could, coming to Europe and America. There was a massive displacement of population, of people. There was a massive resistance by the Afghan people against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. This resistance was national in nature. National in the sense that this resistance wanted to preserve Afghanistan's independence by defeating the Soviets. This resistance wanted to preserve Afghanistan's value system, the traditions of the Afghan people, the religion of the Afghan people, the values of the Afghan people.

When we began to fight the Soviets, the rest of the world came to help us, the West did, the Muslim world did, the neighbours did. This is where the trouble began for Afghanistan. As the Soviets were trying to superimpose Communism on the Afghan people, those who helped us tried to impose radicalism of the other kind on the Afghan people � religious radicalism, religious extremism � because it was felt that the resistance against the Soviets could only be done by the extremist elements, that the more moderate nationalist elements probably would make a deal with the Soviets. Nobody wanted a deal with the Soviets. They wanted a complete defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan at whatever cost. The West was interested in the defeat of the Soviet Union. Whatever tools were available or that they could make together with their friends in the Muslim world were legitimate tools, including extremist religious elements, including promotion of that element and the superimposition of that element on the Afghan people.

The Islamic world did the same thing, those who helped us. Our neighbours had a peculiar situation. There was an Islamic revolution in Iran. Of course, the tendency there was to replicate it in Afghanistan. There was Pakistan and Pakistan too, in order to see the kind of Afghanistan Pakistan wanted, opted, out of politics, to support the religious extremism, the political parties that were religiously extreme in the Afghan resistance as against those who were moderate or national in tendencies or in ideologies. So the consequence was that everybody got together support [of religious extremists] on the side of the Afghan resistance, the extremist elements. And everybody on the other side, the Soviet Bloc, ganged up to support [the impostion of] communism on the Afghan people. The consequence of that was the tremendous input of millions of dollars and resources to back up those in the Afghan resistance who were extreme and only extreme in their tendencies and political views.

The fighting was done. The Afghans won. The Soviet Union was defeated. They withdrew in 1989. It took us another three years to unseat the government in Kabul, the Communist government in Kabul. The West withdrew from Afghanistan. There was no longer interest. And Afghanistan was left with [the] extremists that they had left behind. Afghanistan was left with the neighbours. Afghanistan was left with those in the Islamic world who had [�] an interest in promoting extremism. We, the Mujahideen of that time, arrived in Kabul in 1992, began to rule the country, began to destroy it by the infighting among us, by the intervention from the neighbours and by each country trying to have a client in the Mujahideen organization in its favour and that caused a tremendous shock to the Afghan population. That shock brought an element called the Taliban.

The Taliban were a group of the Mujahideen, of the resistance, mostly in southern Afghanistan and other parts of the country, whose mainstream [�] were madrasa students. Madrasa is a place where religious studies are done in Afghanistan. And they began to talk about a [need for] change, because the people were fed up, because the society was completely for a change, for a change that would free the people of Afghanistan from the anarchy and war and terror and horrible circumstances of life. The neighbours thought, well this is the best opportunity to use. And we the Afghans began to think that probably the answer to the anarchy that existed in Afghanistan was the Taliban who suddenly emerged in Kandahar. At first they [�] appeared nationalist. In the beginning they [�] appeared moderate. In the beginning they appeared as a countryside religious movement without the outside linkages, without the ideological baggage that we began to see in them later on. So the Afghan population supported them. They supported them until they came to Kabul. On their arrival in Kabul, their true colours were shown. The colour of extreme extremism in them. The colour of extreme intolerance in them. And also the hand that was playing in them from outside.

Around 1995 � the Taliban came in 1994 � around 1995 we began to see that the Taliban were receiving elements from abroad that at that time we did not recognize as terrorists. At that time we did not know the name of al-Qaeda. At that time, at least people like myself did not know the name of Osama � others did. I did not know. And one day, around the beginning of 1996, a helicopter pilot came to me. And he said, well, a few days ago he took a tall man with two bags on a helicopter from eastern Afghanistan to southern Afghanistan to meet with Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban. And I said who was this tall man. He said he was an Arab, a man from that part of the world. I still did not know that this man was Osama bin Ladin. That was the first contact between Osama bin Ladin and the Taliban movement. And by 1996 we had recognized that the movement was totally becoming alien to Afghan values and Afghan interests. It began to kill people, it began to spread ethnic hatred in Afghanistan, it began to close the schools even more, it began to violate human rights, it began to terrorize the Afghan society, and the more we began to engage with them to change them, the more we found that they were beginning to be more and more alien to Afghan values and the Afghan social system.

Myself and my colleagues began to organize a movement against them, the Taliban, after we found out what they were doing, in around 1997, the end of 1996 - 1997. And for all that time, the beginning of 1997 until September 11, we kept visiting the world, all the capitals, including London, the whole of Europe, the United States, the neighbours, the U.N., to warn them and tell them what was going on in Afghanistan, to warn them and tell them that there was something horrible developing in Afghanistan, very alien to Afghanistan, very un-Afghan that was threatening Afghanistan, Afghan values, Afghan life, Afghan country, Afghan homes, Afghan orchards, but that was also somehow visibly threatening the rest of the world. We went to the U.S. Congress, we went to the U.S. Senate. We spoke in the press about it. Some countries recognized, some did not. Some understood, some did not. But the interest in Afghanistan was so low, the interest and the well-being of the Afghan people wasn't there at all. So the international community told us "Hell, this is your problem. The Taliban are your problem." And we told them that it is not the Taliban alone, it is this massive interference from outside of Afghanistan, there is something much more than the internal dynamics of Afghanistan at work here. [We told them] that the dynamic from outside being put into Afghanistan is causing a massive difficulty, a massive social difficulty, a massive difficulty for the security of the rest of the world. We got reports of the chemical labs that this group of foreigners, together with the Taliban, were setting up in Kandahar and the rest of the country. We got reports of the way they were spreading hatred against the West in Afghanistan, we got reports of how they were moving against the tolerance of the Afghan culture. And it kept going on and on and on and on until they went and destroyed the Buddhas in Afghanistan, the statues there [in Bamiyan]. Even then, unfortunately, the international community only spoke against it, condemned it, did nothing more than that.

And we launched the loya jirga movement and we kept telling the world that they were alien to Afghanistan. The trouble was that the international community felt that there was no internal disagreement with the Taliban, that the resistance to the Taliban in the form of the United Front being done in north of Kabul and in the north of the country was too weak and losing and that the rest of the country was subservient to the movement in that there were no elements around Afghanistan to resist it and to help it. We were not believed when we told them that Afghanistan was ready. For five or six years when I would call people from inside of Afghanistan, the tribal chiefs, the clergy, and tell them: "Are you happy?"

"No."

"Do you want a change of regime in Afghanistan?"

"Yes."

"Are the Taliban good?"

"No."

"Do you support their activities in Afghanistan?"

"No."

"Are they oppressive?"

"Yes."

So why can't we help it? We can't we go and remove this horrible lot from Afghanistan? And [in] the most remote part of the country, the most ordinary of Afghans would tell me that it is not in our capability. And I would ask why not? They would say because the force in Afghanistan is so massively foreign and so strong that with Afghan capabilities we cannot challenge it.

September 11 occurred and then the magnitude of the problem immediately was shown to the world at the cost of the twin towers and more than 3,500 lives there. Then the world woke up and said, "Hell, the Afghans are probably right", that we should do something about it. And it was proven that the Afghans were right because when the United States and its allies came to Afghanistan it took only a month to unseat the Taliban, to remove them and their terrorist allies and al-Qaeda.

And for me, when I moved into Afghanistan to do that, to work against the Taliban, the most important, the starkest form of Afghan opposition came from the countryside clergy. I was hiding in [a country cleric�s] house and I asked him one night, this was the third night of my stay in Afghanistan while the Taliban were still very much in command and ruling, the bombing had just began of their positions, but they were still in control of the Afghanistan, and I called this [cleric], I said, "I want you to raise for me a meeting tonight with some of the tribal chiefs." He said, "Fine." The doors were locked, the gates of the house were locked, the tribal chiefs came climbing over the wall, jumped over the wall, three, four of them, to see me because they were afraid of the Taliban. When they sat with me and when everybody else left the room, only four, five of us sat together, and they said, "Why are you here? This is central Afghanistan." I told them, "I am here to work against the Taliban and to defeat them." I said, "This is the right time. The world is now with us and we can do it." They said, "Yes, you are right, but what are your means?" And I said, "Well, I have no means, we should get together and create the means to do it. Get the people round and let's fight them." And the man in whose house I was a guest, who was a [cleric], a very traditional [cleric], Abdul Rahim is his name, he said: "But Mr. Karzai, but are you serious?" I said, "Yes, I'm very serious." He said, "But if you are serious, then you should know that we can't do this, because if you try to launch an operation against them, they will crush us with brutality and our women and children will suffer and we will not win." I said, "Well the, what do you think is the answer?" And he said, "If you are serious, you ask the U.S. to send its planes to bomb the Taliban headquarters in that town. The police headquarters, the army headquarters." I was shocked. I told this man, "What do you mean? How can I ask the U.S. to come and bomb my country?" He said, "Well, then you're not serious. Then you don't mean to defeat the Taliban, then you just want probably to cause us trouble." And I said, "I'm sorry, I can't do that." He said, "Well, if you can't do that then you leave this place." And they made me leave that place. They sent me from the villages to the mountains. They said, "Well, if the Taliban attack you in the mountains, we will help you. If they attack you in the villages, our defence will mean the loss of life, lots of civilians and children. So you go to the mountains." And only when I was in the mountains did the U.S. do things like that on its own, fortunately, and the defeat of the Taliban came.

There was no place that we went to that we took by fighting. The places that we went to were evacuated beforehand by the Taliban, the people had taken it already. The point here is that the Afghan people were victims of terrorism. From the day we began to fight against the Soviets, from the day help came to Afghanistan and was given to the resistance, from the day the Soviets left and from the day the Taliban came until the Taliban and terrorism left. If a cleric in Afghanistan would ask me to ask the U.S. to come and bomb the Taliban headquarters this means tremendous pragmatism and realism in recognition that this country was suffering, in recognition that his country was occupied by a terrorist force, in recognition that we could not free ourselves without that sort of help. That is why the Afghan people so wholeheartedly welcomed the Allied forces to come into Afghanistan, that is why the Afghan people so overwhelmingly stood in ovation to greet and say goodbye to General McColl who is here with us, who was the British commander of the Afghanistan's International Security Assistance Force in Kabul.

The people of Afghanistan, the people of the region, the people in the Islamic countries, ladies and gentlemen, are not radical. Radicalism is a creation of politics, of the extension in that part of the world. Radicalism is the consequence of the belief that the Soviet Union, that Communism could only be destroyed with the help of religious extremism. In the subsequent neglect of it, the Afghan people, especially, have never been radical. They are moderate, they are tolerant and that is shown by the defeat of the Taliban in such a short time and that is shown right now by the openness of the Afghan society, by the openness of the press, by the openness of what has developed in Afghanistan in the form of institutions and by the gratitude of the Afghan people to the international community for the help they gave to Afghanistan to free itself.

The way ahead for us, for Afghanistan, for that region, and for the rest of the world and for the continuation of our fight against extremism and terrorism is institution-building in Afghanistan, is laying down the foundations of a democratic society. Afghanistan has the ingredients already. Afghanistan historically is a country of consultations. We have [an institution] in Afghanistan, thousands of years of old, at least when we boast as Afghans we say [it has existed for] three thousand years, an institution that is called the loya jirga, a consulted body of Afghans that is called upon when the country is in need of consultation, that is called upon when the country is in crisis. That tradition has continued. And we proved the value of that body last year when we called in June a Grand Council of the Afghan people, 1,500 of them, when they began to deliberate and discuss and eventually choose a government and the mechanisms that would lead us to a better future.

In Afghanistan, we have undertaken, ladies and gentlemen, since the establishment of the government after the Bonn agreement, the political process that would lead this country by 2004, by June of 2004, to an institutionalised democratic country and society. We had the Bonn agreement, we had the subsequent loya jirga that established the interim government in Afghanistan, we have launched the constitution-building process in the country that should be ready by the end of October and will be presented to the Constitutional Assembly for ratification, we have almost begun to establish an election commission that would take Afghanistan, prepare Afghanistan for elections in 2004, we have a judicial commission to prepare the judicial system of Afghanistan, and the end objective is to have Afghanistan readied by 2004, by June of 2004, for a one man, one vote way of life. We hope to have given this country by that time the right to choose its president by direct vote and we also hope to have given this country, by June of 2004, we're trying very hard and let's see if we can do it, by 2004 that Afghanistan will vote a system where people will choose their parliament as well to govern that country.

I don't think that any man is [inherently] radical in the Islamic societies. I don't think that the common people in the Muslim world are radicals. The great part, the absolute majority, of the Muslim world [is] as good, as moderate and sensible as you would find in your own societies here. Unfortunately, the circumstances of life in the past 30 years, in the form of various applications of political manoeuvres and the suffering and the neglect of societies, [led] some people to be radical. And those radical elements have now become tools of their own anger, tools of their own frustration that we have to address. If that is [in] Pakistan we have to address it, if that is in other parts of the world we have to address it, if that is in the Arab world we have to address it.

But there is another side to this: Terrorism. Terrorism, as a phenomena, developed in the past 20 years. Terrorism, in my mind, I cannot describe it in exact terms. Those who came to Afghanistan, I would call them professional killers. I do not see in them an ideological element. I do not think they have values. I do not think they intend to have a value for them. I do not think they are looking toward the improvement of life. I do not think they are looking to a future that they think is good for the rest of mankind, for the rest of the world community. I think those who now claim in the name of Islam or in the name of religion or in the name of justice to kill people are neither Muslims nor justice-seekers nor people with a value system. I think they are just plain criminals who have become habituated to killing people and enjoy to kill people. If they had a value, if they were Muslims, if they believed in goodness, why would they go and kill a woman north of Kabul, why would they burn her house, why would they burn her orchard, why would they burn her vineyard? Why would a man that claims to believe in Islam, why would a man that claims to be doing things for Islam go and kill the poorest of the Muslim world, the Afghan people? The most believing of the Muslims � the Afghan world. Why would he go and tell a woman that prays five times a day, that works like hell, that earns her living by working in the poorest of the fields? And yet he goes and kills her and destroys her field. These are not just seekers. These are gangs of criminals who thrive on their crime, for whom this is a way of life.

And in order to end terrorism, I do not think we have to go through ideology or seek to modify their ideologies or find out the roots of their ideology. There is no ideology in my mind for them. To finish terrorism and to fight it effectively, we have to go to governments who have been tolerating some of them. We have to go to governments who have been using some of them for this or that purpose against this or that person or group or country. I think we have to look around in the systems around the world that have had uses for these elements once or twice or now and then. We do not have to go and look into the societies to find them to stop terrorism or to remove terrorism. The roots of terrorism are not in societies. The roots of terrorism are not in religions. The roots of terrorism are not in ideologies. The roots of terrorism are in the crude, cruel political use of elements to subvert societies in their interest or to promote certain objectives by the use of violence [through] people like Osama and the likes of him [�].

When Osama says that he is working for the betterment of Muslims, I would like to have this man face me one day in a forum like this. I would like him to stand there and speak and I would like to confront him. When he says he is working in the name of Islam, I would like to ask him the consequences of his actions [�] for Islam? I would like to ask him if his actions have killed more Muslims or those who he believes to be the enemies of Muslims. I would like to ask him about the lives of thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of common Afghans, children, women, elderly, that he killed, that he brutalized, that he speared with [bayonets]. Babies. Of the mosques that he destroyed. The holy books of Koran that he and his associates destroyed.

Last night somebody called me on my telephone. I thought it was one of my colleagues. It was a Muslim man in the U.K. Somebody from Pakistan. I was shocked to hear him talk of Osama as a Muslim. He told me, "Why are you trying to deliver Osama?" And I got very angry with him. And I told him that I do not think Osama is a Muslim. I do not think Osama is a human being. If he thinks he has done a great thing by having gone to destroy two buildings in New York, where the whole world was working, [he is mistaken]; if he wanted to kill Christians, he did not do that. He killed everybody. He killed Muslims. In whose name is he talking? He killed humanity, he killed mankind. If he thinks he was active in Afghanistan in order to promote Islam, well, he did that by killing Muslims, by stopping education for them. By denying education to them, by denying to them an economy, a life.

So terrorism, ladies and gentlemen. In my eyes I have a very, very simple explanation for [terrorists]: gangs of criminal killers used, unfortunately, by certain governments in the past for political purposes who are on their own now as gangs of criminals, like mafia, like the gangs that smuggle heroin, like the gangs that smuggle human beings, like any other gang that lives on criminal activity. That is how I would describe them. And I would hope that those of our Muslim brothers who live in Europe and America [would] see that speaking in the name of radicalism or extremism is not serving the cause of Islam. That if they find a value in that sort of thinking, that is not Islam. Islam is compassionate. Islam is progress. Islam is justice. Islam is kindness. Islam is good neighbourly relations. Islam is a relation with the rest of the world. Islam is not what they think to be extremism.

But I also would like to tell the Western societies, the non-Muslims, that those who speak in the name of extremism, those who commit crimes are not the representatives of Islam. These guys are the representatives of anti-Islam. That the inner Islamic society is full of tolerance and compassion and understanding and desirous of a good life for all and tolerant of other opinions and ideals. Tolerant of other values and traditions. And Islam lives well side-by-side with other religions and other value systems. I think it is time for all of us to evaluate and look within ourselves to find out the mistakes that we have made in identifying trends of the tiniest, tiniest, tiniest minority and then linking that to the majority of a society or of a people. That is a terrible mistake that we have made in the past. And I hope we all will not repeat that mistake. I hope we in the Muslim world and in the East, will not consider a man that comes and throws a stone or a bottle or something at another person because of his colour as the representative of the Western society. No. And I hope in the same manner we will not consider an extremist in our societies as the representative of the Muslims world. Thank you very much.

[Applause and standing ovation.]