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by Dexter Filkins,
Mark Mazzetti and James Risen
The New York Times
October 27, 2009
KABUL, Afghanistan
— Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected
player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular
payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the
past eight years, according to current and former American officials.
The agency pays
Mr. Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an
Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.’s direction in and
around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home.
The financial ties
and close working relationship between the intelligence agency and Mr.
Karzai raise significant questions about America’s war strategy, which
is currently under review at the White House.
The ties to Mr.
Karzai have created deep divisions within the Obama administration. The
critics say the ties complicate America’s increasingly tense
relationship with President Hamid Karzai, who has struggled to build
sustained popularity among Afghans and has long been portrayed by the
Taliban as an American puppet. The C.I.A.’s practices also suggest that
the United States is not doing everything in its power to stamp out the
lucrative Afghan drug trade, a major source of revenue for the Taliban.
More broadly, some
American officials argue that the reliance on Ahmed Wali Karzai, the
most powerful figure in a large area of southern Afghanistan where the
Taliban insurgency is strongest, undermines the American push to develop
an effective central government that can maintain law and order and
eventually allow the United States to withdraw.
“If we are going
to conduct a population-centric strategy in Afghanistan, and we are
perceived as backing thugs, then we are just undermining ourselves,”
said Maj. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the senior American military
intelligence official in Afghanistan.
Ahmed Wali Karzai
said in an interview that he cooperated with American civilian and
military officials, but did not engage in the drug trade and did not
receive payments from the C.I.A.
The relationship
between Mr. Karzai and the C.I.A. is wide ranging, several American
officials said. He helps the C.I.A. operate a paramilitary group, the
Kandahar Strike Force, that is used for raids against suspected
insurgents and terrorists. On at least one occasion, the strike force
has been accused of mounting an unauthorized operation against an
official of the Afghan government, the officials said.
Mr. Karzai is also
paid for allowing the C.I.A. and American Special Operations troops to
rent a large compound outside the city — the former home of Mullah
Mohammed Omar, the Taliban’s founder. The same compound is also the base
of the Kandahar Strike Force. “He’s our landlord,” a senior American
official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
Mr. Karzai also
helps the C.I.A. communicate with and sometimes meet with Afghans loyal
to the Taliban. Mr. Karzai’s role as a go-between between the Americans
and the Taliban is now regarded as valuable by those who support working
with Mr. Karzai, as the Obama administration is placing a greater focus
on encouraging Taliban leaders to change sides.
A C.I.A. spokesman
declined to comment for this article.
“No
intelligence organization worth the name would ever entertain these kind
of allegations,” said Paul Gimigliano, the spokesman.
Some American
officials said that the allegations of Mr. Karzai’s role in the drug
trade were not conclusive.
“There’s no proof
of Ahmed Wali Karzai’s involvement in drug trafficking, certainly
nothing that would stand up in court,” said one American official
familiar with the intelligence. “And you can’t ignore what the Afghan
government has done for American counterterrorism efforts.”
At the start of
the Afghan war, just after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United
States, American officials paid warlords with questionable backgrounds
to help topple the Taliban and maintain order with relatively few
American troops committed to fight in the country. But as the Taliban
has become resurgent and the war has intensified, Americans have
increasingly viewed a strong and credible central government as crucial
to turning back the Taliban’s advances.
Now, with more
American lives on the line, the relationship with Mr. Karzai is setting
off anger and frustration among American military officers and other
officials in the Obama administration. They say that Mr. Karzai’s
suspected role in the drug trade, as well as what they describe as the
mafialike way that he lords over southern Afghanistan, makes him a
malevolent force.
These military and
political officials say the evidence, though largely circumstantial,
suggests strongly that Mr. Karzai has enriched himself by helping the
illegal trade in poppy and opium to flourish. The assessment of these
military and senior officials in the Obama administration dovetails with
that of senior officials in the Bush administration.
“Hundreds of
millions of dollars in drug money are flowing through the southern
region, and nothing happens in southern Afghanistan without the regional
leadership knowing about it,” a senior American military officer in
Kabul said. Like most of the officials in this article, he spoke on the
condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of the information.
“If it looks like
a duck, and it quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck,” the American
officer said of Mr. Karzai. “Our assumption is that he’s benefiting from
the drug trade.”
American
officials say that Afghanistan’s opium trade, the largest in the world,
directly threatens the stability of the Afghan state, by providing a
large percentage of the money the Taliban needs for its operations, and
also by corrupting Afghan public officials to help the trade flourish.
The Obama
administration has repeatedly vowed to crack down on the drug lords who
are believed to permeate the highest levels of President Karzai’s
administration. They have pressed him to move his brother out of
southern Afghanistan, but he has so far refused to do so.
Other Western
officials pointed to evidence that Ahmed Wali Karzai orchestrated the
manufacture of hundreds of thousands of phony ballots for his brother’s
re-election effort in August. He is also believed to have been
responsible for setting up dozens of so-called ghost polling stations —
existing only on paper — that were used to manufacture tens of thousands
of phony ballots.
“The only way
to clean up Chicago is to get rid of Capone,” General Flynn said.
In the interview
in which he denied a role in the drug trade or taking money from the
C.I.A., Ahmed Wali Karzai said he received regular payments from his
brother, the president, for “expenses,” but said he did not know where
the money came from. He has, among other things, introduced Americans to
insurgents considering changing sides. And he has given the Americans
intelligence, he said. But he said he was not compensated for that
assistance.
“I don’t know
anyone under the name of the C.I.A.,” Mr. Karzai said. “I have never
received any money from any organization. I help, definitely. I help
other Americans wherever I can. This is my duty as an Afghan.”
Mr. Karzai
acknowledged that the C.I.A. and Special Operations troops stayed at
Mullah Omar’s old compound. And he acknowledged that the Kandahar Strike
Force was based there. But he said he had no involvement with them.
A former C.I.A.
officer with experience in Afghanistan said the agency relied heavily on
Ahmed Wali Karzai, and often based covert operatives at compounds he
owned. Any connections Mr. Karzai might have had to the drug trade
mattered little to C.I.A. officers focused on counterterrorism missions,
the officer said.
“Virtually
every significant Afghan figure has had brushes with the drug trade,” he
said. “If you are looking for Mother Teresa, she doesn’t live in
Afghanistan.”
The debate over
Ahmed Wali Karzai, which began when President Obama took office in
January, intensified in June, when the C.I.A.’s local paramilitary
group, the Kandahar Strike Force, shot and killed Kandahar’s provincial
police chief, Matiullah Qati, in a still-unexplained shootout at the
office of a local prosecutor.
The circumstances
surrounding Mr. Qati’s death remain shrouded in mystery. It is unclear,
for instance, if any agency operatives were present — but officials say
the firefight broke out when Mr. Qati tried to block the strike force
from freeing the brother of a task force member who was being held in
custody.
“Matiullah was in
the wrong place at the wrong time,” Mr. Karzai said in the interview.
Counternarcotics officials have repeatedly expressed frustration over
the unwillingness of senior policy makers in Washington to take action
against Mr. Karzai — or even begin a serious investigation of the
allegations against him. In fact, they say that while other Afghans
accused of drug involvement are investigated and singled out for raids
or even rendition to the United States, Mr. Karzai has seemed immune
from similar scrutiny.
For years, first
the Bush administration and then the Obama administration have said that
the Taliban benefits from the drug trade, and the United States military
has recently expanded its target list to include drug traffickers with
ties to the insurgency. The military has generated a list of 50 top
drug traffickers tied to the Taliban who can now be killed or captured.
Senior Afghan
investigators say they know plenty about Mr. Karzai’s involvement in the
drug business. In an interview in Kabul this year, a top former Afghan
Interior Ministry official familiar with Afghan counternarcotics
operations said that a major source of Mr. Karzai’s influence over the
drug trade was his control over key bridges crossing the Helmand River
on the route between the opium growing regions of Helmand Province and
Kandahar.
The former
Interior Ministry official said that Mr. Karzai was able to charge huge
fees to drug traffickers to allow their drug-laden trucks to cross the
bridges.
But the former
officials said it was impossible for Afghan counternarcotics officials
to investigate Mr. Karzai. “This government has become a factory for the
production of Talibs because of corruption and injustice,” the former
official said.
Some American
counternarcotics officials have said they believe that Mr. Karzai has
expanded his influence over the drug trade, thanks in part to American
efforts to single out other drug lords.
In debriefing
notes from Drug Enforcement Administration interviews in 2006 of Afghan
informants obtained by The New York Times, one key informant said that
Ahmed Wali Karzai had benefited from the American operation that lured
Hajji Bashir Noorzai, a major Afghan drug lord during the time that the
Taliban ruled Afghanistan, to New York in 2005. Mr. Noorzai was
convicted on drug and conspiracy charges in New York in 2008, and was
sentenced to life in prison this year.
Habibullah Jan, a
local military commander and later a member of Parliament from Kandahar,
told the D.E.A. in 2006 that Mr. Karzai had teamed with Haji Juma Khan
to take over a portion of the Noorzai drug business after Mr. Noorzai’s
arrest.
Dexter Filkins
reported from Kabul, and Mark Mazzetti and James Risen from Washington.
Helene Cooper contributed reporting from Washington.
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