Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: October 6, 2008 7:40:02 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED],
[EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: "Our Man" Karzai's Brother Linked to Afghan Heroin Trafficking
Reports Link Karzai’s Brother
to Afghanistan Heroin Trade
By JAMES RISEN
New York Times, October 4, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/world/asia/05afghan.html?_r=1&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin
WASHINGTON — When Afghan security forces found an enormous cache of
heroin hidden beneath concrete blocks in a tractor-trailer outside
Kandahar in 2004, the local Afghan commander quickly impounded the
truck and notified his boss.
Before long, the commander, Habibullah Jan, received a telephone call
from Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of President Hamid Karzai, asking
him to release the vehicle and the drugs, Mr. Jan later told American
investigators, according to notes from the debriefing obtained by The
New York Times. He said he complied after getting a phone call from an
aide to President Karzai directing him to release the truck.
Two years later, American and Afghan counternarcotics forces stopped
another truck, this time near Kabul, finding more than 110 pounds of
heroin. Soon after the seizure, United States investigators told other
American officials that they had discovered links between the drug
shipment and a bodyguard believed to be an intermediary for Ahmed Wali
Karzai, according to a participant in the briefing.
The assertions about the involvement of the president’s brother in the
incidents were never investigated, according to American and Afghan
officials, even though allegations that he has benefited from
narcotics trafficking have circulated widely in Afghanistan.
Both President Karzai and Ahmed Wali Karzai, now the chief of the
Kandahar Provincial Council, the governing body for the region that
includes Afghanistan’s second largest city, dismiss the allegations as
politically motivated attacks by longtime foes.
“I am not a drug dealer, I never was and I never will be,” the
president’s brother said in a recent phone interview. “I am a victim
of vicious politics.”
But the assertions about him have deeply worried top American
officials in Kabul and in Washington. The United States officials fear
that perceptions that the Afghan president might be protecting his
brother are damaging his credibility and undermining efforts by the
United States to buttress his government, which has been under siege
from rivals and a Taliban insurgency fueled by drug money, several
senior Bush administration officials said. Their concerns have
intensified as American troops have been deployed to the country in
growing numbers.
“What appears to be a fairly common Afghan public perception of
corruption inside their government is a tremendously corrosive element
working against establishing long-term confidence in that government —
a very serious matter,” said Lt. Gen. David W. Barno, who was
commander of coalition military forces in Afghanistan from 2003 to
2005 and is now retired. “That could be problematic strategically for
the United States.”
The White House says it believes that Ahmed Wali Karzai is involved in
drug trafficking, and American officials have repeatedly warned
President Karzai that his brother is a political liability, two senior
Bush administration officials said in interviews last week.
Numerous reports link Ahmed Wali Karzai to the drug trade, according
to current and former officials from the White House, the State
Department and the United States Embassy in Afghanistan, who would
speak only on the condition of anonymity. In meetings with President
Karzai, including a 2006 session with the United States ambassador,
the Central Intelligence Agency’s station chief and their British
counterparts, American officials have talked about the allegations in
hopes that the president might move his brother out of the country,
said several people who took part in or were briefed on the talks.
“We thought the concern expressed to Karzai might be enough to get him
out of there,” one official said. But President Karzai has resisted,
demanding clear-cut evidence of wrongdoing, several officials said.
“We don’t have the kind of hard, direct evidence that you could take
to get a criminal indictment,” a White House official said. “That
allows Karzai to say, ‘where’s your proof?’ ”
Neither the Drug Enforcement Administration, which conducts
counternarcotics efforts in Afghanistan, nor the fledgling Afghan anti-
drug agency has pursued investigations into the accusations against
the president’s brother.
Several American investigators said senior officials at the D.E.A. and
the office of the Director of National Intelligence complained to them
that the White House favored a hands-off approach toward Ahmed Wali
Karzai because of the political delicacy of the matter. But White
House officials dispute that, instead citing limited D.E.A. resources
in Kandahar and southern Afghanistan and the absence of political will
in the Afghan government to go after major drug suspects as the
reasons for the lack of an inquiry.
“We invested considerable resources into building Afghan capability to
conduct such investigations and consistently encouraged Karzai to take
on the big fish and address widespread Afghan suspicions about the
link between his brother and narcotics,” said Meghan O’Sullivan, who
was the coordinator for Afghanistan and Iraq at the National Security
Council until last year.
It was not clear whether President Bush had been briefed on the
matter.Humayun Hamidzada, press secretary for President Karzai, denied
that the president’s brother was involved in drug trafficking or that
the president had intervened to help him. “People have made
allegations without proof,” Mr. Hamidzada said.
Spokesmen for the Drug Enforcement Administration, the State
Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence
declined to comment.
An Informant’s Tip
The concerns about Ahmed Wali Karzai have surfaced recently because of
the imprisonment of an informant who tipped off American and Afghan
investigators to the drug-filled truck outside Kabul in 2006.
The informant, Hajji Aman Kheri, was arrested a year later on charges
of plotting to kill an Afghan vice president in 2002. The Afghan
Supreme Court recently ordered him freed for lack of evidence, but he
has not been released. Nearly 100 political leaders in his home region
protested his continued incarceration last month.
Mr. Kheri, in a phone interview from jail in Kabul, said he had been
an informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration and United States
intelligence agencies, an assertion confirmed by American
counternarcotics and intelligence officials. Several of those
officials, frustrated that the Bush administration was not pressing
for Mr. Kheri’s release, came forward to disclose his role in the drug
seizure.
Ever since the American-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, critics
have charged that the Bush administration has failed to take
aggressive action against the Afghan narcotics trade, because of both
opposition from the Karzai government and reluctance by the United
States military to get bogged down by eradication and interdiction
efforts that would antagonize local warlords and Afghan poppy farmers.
Now, Afghanistan provides about 95 percent of the world’s supply of
heroin.
Just as the Taliban have benefited from money produced by the drug
trade, so have many officials in the Karzai government, according to
American and Afghan officials. Thomas Schweich, a former senior State
Department counternarcotics official, wrote in The New York Times
Magazine in July that drug traffickers were buying off hundreds of
police chiefs, judges and other officials. “Narco-corruption went to
the top of the Afghan government,” he said.
Suspicions of Corruption
Of the suspicions about Ahmed Wali Karzai, Representative Mark Steven
Kirk, an Illinois Republican who has focused on the Afghan drug
problem in Congress, said, “I would ask people in the Bush
administration and the D.E.A. about him, and they would say, ‘We think
he’s dirty.’ ”
In the two drug seizures in 2004 and 2006, millions of dollars’ worth
of heroin was found. In April 2006, Mr. Jan, by then a member of the
Afghan Parliament, met with American investigators at a D.E.A. safe
house in Kabul and was asked to describe the events surrounding the
2004 drug discovery, according to notes from the debriefing session.
He told the Americans that after impounding the truck, he received
calls from Ahmed Wali Karzai and Shaida Mohammad, an aide to President
Karzai, according to the notes.
Mr. Jan later became a political opponent of President Karzai, and in
a 2007 speech in Parliament he accused Ahmed Wali Karzai of
involvement in the drug trade. Mr. Jan was shot to death in July as he
drove from a guesthouse to his main residence in Kandahar Province.
The Taliban were suspected in the assassination.
Mr. Mohammad, in a recent interview in Washington, dismissed Mr. Jan’s
account, saying that Mr. Jan had fabricated the story about being
pressured to release the drug shipment in order to damage President
Karzai.
But Khan Mohammad, the former Afghan commander in Kandahar who was Mr.
Jan’s superior in 2004, said in a recent interview that Mr. Jan
reported at the time that he had received a call from the Karzai aide
ordering him to release the drug cache. Khan Mohammad recalled that
Mr. Jan believed that the call had been instigated by Ahmed Wali
Karzai, not the president.
“This was a very heavy issue,” Mr. Mohammad said.
He provided the same account in an October 2004 interview with The
Christian Science Monitor. Mr. Mohammad said that after a subordinate
captured a large shipment of heroin about two months earlier, the
official received repeated telephone calls from Ahmed Wali Karzai. “He
was saying, ‘This heroin belongs to me, you should release it,’ ” the
newspaper quoted Mr. Mohammad as saying.
Languishing in Detention
In 2006, Mr. Kheri, the Afghan informant, tipped off American
counternarcotics agents to another drug shipment. Mr. Kheri, who had
proved so valuable to the United States that his family had been
resettled in Virginia in 2004, briefly returned to Afghanistan in 2006.
The heroin in the truck that was seized was to be delivered to Ahmed
Wali Karzai’s bodyguard in the village of Maidan Shahr, and then
transported to Kandahar, one of the Afghans involved in the deal later
told American investigators, according to notes of his debriefing.
Several Afghans — the drivers and the truck’s owner — were arrested by
Afghan authorities, but no action was taken against Mr. Karzai or his
bodyguard, who investigators believe serves as a middleman, the
American officials said.
In 2007, Mr. Kheri visited Afghanistan again, once again serving as an
American informant, the officials said. This time, however, he was
arrested by the Karzai government and charged in the 2002
assassination of Hajji Abdul Qadir, an Afghan vice president, who had
been a political rival of Mr. Kheri’s brother, Hajji Zaman, a former
militia commander and a powerful figure in eastern Afghanistan.
Mr. Kheri, in the phone interview from Kabul, denied any involvement
in the killing and said his arrest was politically motivated. He
maintained that the president’s brother was involved in the heroin
trade.
“It’s no secret about Wali Karzai and drugs,” said Mr. Kheri, who
speaks English. “A lot of people in the Afghan government are involved
in drug trafficking.”
Mr. Kheri’s continued detention, despite the Afghan court’s order to
release him, has frustrated some of the American investigators who
worked with him.
In recent months, they have met with officials at the State Department
and the office of the Director of National Intelligence seeking to
persuade the Bush administration to intervene with the Karzai
government to release Mr. Kheri.
“We have just left a really valuable informant sitting in jail to
rot,” one investigator said.
Carlotta Gall contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan.
New MapQuest Local shows what's happening at your destination. Dining,
Movies, Events, News & more. Try it out!