Mohammad Omar Daudzai

In the summer of 2010, outside Daudzai's influence, Karzai sat down with a man believed to be former Taliban Cabinet minister Akhtar Muhammad Mansour to discuss peace between the Taliban and the Afghan Government. According to Daudzai, it later turned out the man wasn't Mansour at all, but an imposter who was just a shopkeeper in Quetta. Daudzai blamed the British for this debacle, because he said that they brought the man in front of Karzai. "International partners should not get excited so quickly with those kinds of things," Daudzai said, adding that the incident shows that the Afghan peace talks should be "Afghan-led and fully Afghanized."[7] According to Wikileaks Cables Daudzai also believed that the Norwegians might have been fooled into meeting self-proclaimed members of the Taliban who may in fact not have been Taliban members at all. Daudzai claimed that he had never heard anything about contact between the Taliban and Norwegian authorities.[8]

The Atlantic profiled him as:[9] "A soft-spoken former aid worker, Daudzai served as the president’s liaison to the many warlords and strongmen he had to keep in check—both to ensure stability and to secure his reelection in 2009. While Daudzai was once associated with the conservative Hizb-e-Islami party, the 56-year-old...is more pragmatic in his worldview. When Karzai made an ultimately unsuccessful push for reconciliation with the Taliban in 2011, he dispatched Daudzai as his ambassador to Pakistan. To express his displeasure with the Americans, who tried to oust him during his 2009 reelection campaign, Karzai replaced Daudzai as chief of staff with Abdul Karim Khurram, a conservative former culture minister with an anti-American reputation."

In 2010, there were rumors that then President Hamid Karzai's office was receiving bags filled, with cash from Iranian officials. Karzai acknowledged and accepted the fact that the Government of Iran has been providing millions of dollars directly to his office. Karzai told reporters he had instructed Daudzai to accept the money from Tehran. "It is official and by my order," Karzai said.[10] Iranians also stated that the report was indeed true. Two weeks after the controversy about the Iranian money Daudzai came out to the Afghan Media for an open interview. In the interview Daudzai showed piles of files that proved that every cent of the money coming from Iran were spent on government expenses only and that he had record for all the money that came from Iran. He also claimed that Iranian money had been coming to Afghanistan since 2002 but the issue was brought out only now in order to pressure the Karzai government for political reasons[11][12][13] and that since 2002 also the US, the UK and Japan had provided the presidential office with cash assistance.[14] According to Newsweek, nearly every encounter between Afghan and Iranian officials ends up with the Iranians proffering a sack of cash.[15]

According to wikileaks cables Daudzai told deputy US ambassador Francis Ricciardone already in February 2010 that certain Afghan officials were on Tehran's payroll, including some people nominated for cabinet positions. Daudzai claimed that some of these officials had been relieved of their duties because 'you can't be an honest Afghan if you receive a package from Iran.'[16] Daudzai had told Ricciardone, and he said that his government preferred the US' sustained cash support to the 'occasional and unpredictable' payments from Iran.[17]