Ahmed Wali Karzai builds private army to protect his clan in post-NATO vacuum
* December 5th, 2010 12:21 am ET
Ahmed Wali Karzai builds private army to protect his clan in post-NATO vacuum - National Afghanistan Headlines | Examiner.com
One of the more interesting WikiLeaks tidbits this week was the disclosure of how Ahmed Wali Karzai (AWK), the half-brother of Afghanistan’s president, is apparently building up a personal private army to protect the Karzai clan in preparation for the violent struggle for power likely to ensue once the U.S.-led coalition finally withdraws.
AWK has consolidated power in Kandahar to such an extent that the Karzai family now has dominance over most provincial economic and security activities. U.S. diplomats have indicated, according to The Guardian, that the Karzais might be leveraging this powerful nexus to create a private regional army to protect themselves from rivals.
U.S. officials have stressed how AWK has been trying to get the interior ministry to authorize him to license all contractors and their weapons through the Kandahar provincial council of which AWK sits atop, which "has the potential to arm the Karzai clan with a non-state entity that can insure against whoever should come to power in Afghanistan".
In other words, the Karzai clan might be stocked with the corrupt and the insane, but certainly not the stupid - they see the writing on the wall. Hamid and AWK realize that once NATO exits Kabul will be up-for-grabs and they know they have much less political support than former Afghan President Najibullah had when the Soviets left him behind. And who knows how many times Karzai has cringed at the mental image of Najibullah’s blood-soaked body hanging like an ornament in Aryana Square courtesy of the Taliban.
Beyond this, the cables confirm much of the same old about AWK – that he is an extorting, embezzling war profiteer and drug-trafficker extraordinaire. One cable in particular worthy of mention is entitled, "Kandahar politics complicate US objectives in Afghanistan" which characterizes Karzai’s pernicious half-brother as the equivalent of a mob boss:
As the kingpin of Kandahar, Ahmed Wali Karzai (AWK) dominates access to economic resources, patronage, and protection. Much of the real business of running Kandahar takes place out of public sight, where AWK operates, parallel to formal government structures, through a network of political clans that use state institutions to protect and enable licit and illicit enterprises.
The cable describes him as an "unrivaled strongman" whose purpose as chairman of the Kandahar provincial council is the “enrichment, extension and perpetuation of the Karzai clan, and along with it their branch of the Popalzai tribe.”
However, unlike other strongmen who have public support because they fund useful projects and deliver services, AWK is widely unpopular in Kandahar because he rules exclusively rather than inclusively, is not perceived as caring about the population and is simply using his power to “feed his tribe”.
This mafioso narrative is quite familiar considering what I wrote back in May about the alarming magnitude of the Karzai family’s corruption. One senior NATO official had calculated that the “Karzai cartel” was making more than a billion dollars a year off the Afghanistan war via lucrative contracts and sub-contracting spin-offs in convoy protection, construction, fuel, food and security.
Ann Marlowe has been on the ground in Afghanistan through six “embeds” and seems to have a solid grasp of the Karzai character, going so far as to accuse them of complicity with the enemy. Marlowe once poetically scribed:
We are supporting a criminal state in Kabul that is likely involved with the insurgency itself. There is almost nothing to distinguish the Taliban from the Karzai mafias, whose tentacles reach down to the most obscure rural districts. The Afghan state is being hollowed out from the inside and becoming a branch of a lucrative criminal enterprise. Why would the Karzais have any interest in defeating the insurgency? They are profiting from it.
Marlowe concluded that “effectively, we are in Afghanistan so that the Karzai cartel can steal even more money. Is that worth losing our soldiers for?” To Marlowe’s point - the Karzai’s are a mafia in the most literal sense. Members of rival tribes who happen to speak out against the Karzais beg for anonymity, because as one tribal elder told the New York Times last year: “Local officials who don’t obey him (AWK) are killed. He has his own militias and elements of the Taliban. He can kill whenever he wants.”
There is sufficient evidence to nail AWK for his narcotics activities and other Karzai family members for other assorted crimes but they’ve all gone untouched. And the cables reveal some very sad reasons why this is the case:
"Initiatives that rely on the Afghan government to take the lead in bringing to justice major corrupt figures or negative influences in Kandahar contain a serious dilemma: they would include some of Karzai's closest relatives and allies and require the prosecution of people on whom we often rely for assistance and/or support. Second, any efforts to bring these individuals to justice could compromise the informal governing networks to which Kandaharis have become accustomed, without necessarily replacing them with effective government officials or improving the delivery of services."
In February the US finally began to consider what measures to take "against criminal and corrupt Afghan officials in an effort to change their behavior … and end tacit American support for corrupt Afghan officials". There were even suggestions of possible law enforcement actions against three prominent maligned actors in southern Afghanistan: Abdul Razziq, Ahmed Wali Karzai, and Asadullah Sherzad.
Yet, so far, no prosecution of AWK has taken place as he continues to denounce these accusations as defamatory and baseless. AWK even had the gall to tell a U.S. official he was willing to take a lie detector test to prove his innocence. The same official commented about AWK afterwards in a cable: “He [AWK] appears not to understand the level of our knowledge of his activities…”
I am not so convinced. I am willing to bet AWK is well aware of what the U.S. knows because he has friends in high places, the most cherished of which are the intimate relationships he’s developed within the CIA based on a mutual interest in the international opium market. According to Douglas Wissing in The Huffington Post:
Reports by The New York Times, ABC News, The Washington Timesand The Times of Londonon Ahmad Wali Karzai paint a picture of a corrupt kingpin in the opium-soaked Kandahar heartland of the Taliban. The recent WikiLeaks disclosures show AWK's extensive connections to the CIA, long involved in the drug trade in the Golden Triangle, Latin America and Afghanistan, as historian Alfred W. McCoy has documented in his magisterial The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Trade.
And the fact that AWK, according to the New York Times, was on the CIA payroll for eight years best explains his untouchable status. As Robert Baer wrote in a Time magazine piece last year:
According to the New York Times, the brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, is a CIA source, providing bases for the CIA as well as the U.S. military and serving as a go-between with parts of the Taliban. If it sounds a lot like Vietnam when Vietnam started to really come apart, it is — President Diem's grotesquely corrupt brother was a CIA source and a noxious agent of influence.
Defense Intelligence chief Gen. Michael T. Flynn during this same period voiced concern that the U.S. purported “population-centric” strategy was being undermined by the perception (and reality) that the U.S. was aligned with thugs. The spy chief then delivered his recommendation on the AWK situation loosely ensconced in an overt yet devilishly befitting analogy:
"The only way to clean up Chicago," Flynn declared, "is to get rid of Capone."
* December 5th, 2010 12:21 am ET
Ahmed Wali Karzai builds private army to protect his clan in post-NATO vacuum - National Afghanistan Headlines | Examiner.com
One of the more interesting WikiLeaks tidbits this week was the disclosure of how Ahmed Wali Karzai (AWK), the half-brother of Afghanistan’s president, is apparently building up a personal private army to protect the Karzai clan in preparation for the violent struggle for power likely to ensue once the U.S.-led coalition finally withdraws.
AWK has consolidated power in Kandahar to such an extent that the Karzai family now has dominance over most provincial economic and security activities. U.S. diplomats have indicated, according to The Guardian, that the Karzais might be leveraging this powerful nexus to create a private regional army to protect themselves from rivals.
U.S. officials have stressed how AWK has been trying to get the interior ministry to authorize him to license all contractors and their weapons through the Kandahar provincial council of which AWK sits atop, which "has the potential to arm the Karzai clan with a non-state entity that can insure against whoever should come to power in Afghanistan".
In other words, the Karzai clan might be stocked with the corrupt and the insane, but certainly not the stupid - they see the writing on the wall. Hamid and AWK realize that once NATO exits Kabul will be up-for-grabs and they know they have much less political support than former Afghan President Najibullah had when the Soviets left him behind. And who knows how many times Karzai has cringed at the mental image of Najibullah’s blood-soaked body hanging like an ornament in Aryana Square courtesy of the Taliban.
Beyond this, the cables confirm much of the same old about AWK – that he is an extorting, embezzling war profiteer and drug-trafficker extraordinaire. One cable in particular worthy of mention is entitled, "Kandahar politics complicate US objectives in Afghanistan" which characterizes Karzai’s pernicious half-brother as the equivalent of a mob boss:
As the kingpin of Kandahar, Ahmed Wali Karzai (AWK) dominates access to economic resources, patronage, and protection. Much of the real business of running Kandahar takes place out of public sight, where AWK operates, parallel to formal government structures, through a network of political clans that use state institutions to protect and enable licit and illicit enterprises.
The cable describes him as an "unrivaled strongman" whose purpose as chairman of the Kandahar provincial council is the “enrichment, extension and perpetuation of the Karzai clan, and along with it their branch of the Popalzai tribe.”
However, unlike other strongmen who have public support because they fund useful projects and deliver services, AWK is widely unpopular in Kandahar because he rules exclusively rather than inclusively, is not perceived as caring about the population and is simply using his power to “feed his tribe”.
This mafioso narrative is quite familiar considering what I wrote back in May about the alarming magnitude of the Karzai family’s corruption. One senior NATO official had calculated that the “Karzai cartel” was making more than a billion dollars a year off the Afghanistan war via lucrative contracts and sub-contracting spin-offs in convoy protection, construction, fuel, food and security.
Ann Marlowe has been on the ground in Afghanistan through six “embeds” and seems to have a solid grasp of the Karzai character, going so far as to accuse them of complicity with the enemy. Marlowe once poetically scribed:
We are supporting a criminal state in Kabul that is likely involved with the insurgency itself. There is almost nothing to distinguish the Taliban from the Karzai mafias, whose tentacles reach down to the most obscure rural districts. The Afghan state is being hollowed out from the inside and becoming a branch of a lucrative criminal enterprise. Why would the Karzais have any interest in defeating the insurgency? They are profiting from it.
Marlowe concluded that “effectively, we are in Afghanistan so that the Karzai cartel can steal even more money. Is that worth losing our soldiers for?” To Marlowe’s point - the Karzai’s are a mafia in the most literal sense. Members of rival tribes who happen to speak out against the Karzais beg for anonymity, because as one tribal elder told the New York Times last year: “Local officials who don’t obey him (AWK) are killed. He has his own militias and elements of the Taliban. He can kill whenever he wants.”
There is sufficient evidence to nail AWK for his narcotics activities and other Karzai family members for other assorted crimes but they’ve all gone untouched. And the cables reveal some very sad reasons why this is the case:
"Initiatives that rely on the Afghan government to take the lead in bringing to justice major corrupt figures or negative influences in Kandahar contain a serious dilemma: they would include some of Karzai's closest relatives and allies and require the prosecution of people on whom we often rely for assistance and/or support. Second, any efforts to bring these individuals to justice could compromise the informal governing networks to which Kandaharis have become accustomed, without necessarily replacing them with effective government officials or improving the delivery of services."
In February the US finally began to consider what measures to take "against criminal and corrupt Afghan officials in an effort to change their behavior … and end tacit American support for corrupt Afghan officials". There were even suggestions of possible law enforcement actions against three prominent maligned actors in southern Afghanistan: Abdul Razziq, Ahmed Wali Karzai, and Asadullah Sherzad.
Yet, so far, no prosecution of AWK has taken place as he continues to denounce these accusations as defamatory and baseless. AWK even had the gall to tell a U.S. official he was willing to take a lie detector test to prove his innocence. The same official commented about AWK afterwards in a cable: “He [AWK] appears not to understand the level of our knowledge of his activities…”
I am not so convinced. I am willing to bet AWK is well aware of what the U.S. knows because he has friends in high places, the most cherished of which are the intimate relationships he’s developed within the CIA based on a mutual interest in the international opium market. According to Douglas Wissing in The Huffington Post:
Reports by The New York Times, ABC News, The Washington Timesand The Times of Londonon Ahmad Wali Karzai paint a picture of a corrupt kingpin in the opium-soaked Kandahar heartland of the Taliban. The recent WikiLeaks disclosures show AWK's extensive connections to the CIA, long involved in the drug trade in the Golden Triangle, Latin America and Afghanistan, as historian Alfred W. McCoy has documented in his magisterial The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Trade.
And the fact that AWK, according to the New York Times, was on the CIA payroll for eight years best explains his untouchable status. As Robert Baer wrote in a Time magazine piece last year:
According to the New York Times, the brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, is a CIA source, providing bases for the CIA as well as the U.S. military and serving as a go-between with parts of the Taliban. If it sounds a lot like Vietnam when Vietnam started to really come apart, it is — President Diem's grotesquely corrupt brother was a CIA source and a noxious agent of influence.
Defense Intelligence chief Gen. Michael T. Flynn during this same period voiced concern that the U.S. purported “population-centric” strategy was being undermined by the perception (and reality) that the U.S. was aligned with thugs. The spy chief then delivered his recommendation on the AWK situation loosely ensconced in an overt yet devilishly befitting analogy:
"The only way to clean up Chicago," Flynn declared, "is to get rid of Capone."
Comment