Narcotics

Reports Link Karzai’s Brother to Heroin Trade

(Photo: Ahmed Wali Karzai, President Hamid Karzai’s brother, in 2001. Both say accusations of drug trafficking are politically motivated.)


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 tto the country in growing numbers.

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I lived in Afghanistan for a while in 1971-1972. Already then, the CIA was deeply involved in drug trafficking - opium (at the time, there was not much heroin there, the labs being situated in Pakistan) and hashish, and active in rooting-out and eliminating competition by either killing the people involved if they were Afghans, or having them jailed by paying the already very corrupt Afghan police to arrest and throw them in jail if they were foreigners (so as not to draw unwanted attraction to its shenaningans by killing them). I used to visit two young women in the Kabul prison - a Belgian woman and a French woman - who had fallen victim to the CIA's denunciation. The Afghan government was, at that time, not at all concerned about Europeans and Americans buying hashish and opium and taking it out of the country. After all, it was business, it brought much foreign currency to the country. The CIA hated the amateur competition, though, especially as it brought the street-prices down in Europe and the USA.

I reckon that, today, the CIA regards the Taliban as competition in the drug business... it is, after all, a multi-billion dollar business. (Photo: Ahmed Wali Karzai, President Hamid Karzai’s brother, in 2001. Both say accusations of drug trafficking are politically motivat... more

Vierotchka

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