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Reports Link Karzai's Brother to Heroin Trade
Pubdate: Sun, 5 Oct 2008
Source: New York Times (NY)
Page: A1, Front Page
Copyright: 2008 The New York Times Company
Contact: http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: James Risen
Note: Carlotta Gall contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan.
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Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?236 (Corruption - Outside U.S.)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/heroin.htm (Heroin)
REPORTS LINK KARZAI'S BROTHER TO HEROIN TRADE
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.
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake