CIA In Bed with Karzai’s Corrupt Brother
28 October 2009 1:00 pm by Taylor Marsh
“The only way to clean up Chicago is to get rid of Capone,” General Flynn said. – Brother of Afghan Leader Is Said to Be on C.I.A. Payroll
I wonder if this was Dick Cheney’s idea?
Andrew Exum writes today that it’s the most important article on Afghanistan that you’re going to read this week: Again, I am not in a position to confirm or deny that the CIA has an enduring relationship with AWK, and I am telling the truth when I tell you that all I “know” about this is what I read in the open source world. But you can be darn sure that if we think that AWK is the CIA’s guy, the Afghans most certainly believe that to be the case.
The real trouble is, if the New York Times is correct, it’s still going on now that Obama’s in charge. Whatever happened to Leon Panetta’s principles? They’re lost somewhere in Afghanistan, along with money paid to yet another Karzai bag man.
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 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. …
Meanwhile, you’ve got NATO/ISAF (UN-mandated International Security Assistance Force) working on another track saying that government corruption is the problem. CIA v. NATO/ISAF, with U.S. forces caught in the middle. Marvelous.
Amidst the CIA payouts to Karzai’s brother, Obama’s Afghan strategy seems to be slowly emerging, with another meeting planned with Mullen on Friday. So far it seems to be pretty much what I’ve written would happen. A little bit of this and a little bit of that, but more troops seeming definite:
A strategy of protecting major Afghan population centers would be “McChrystal for the city, Biden for the country,” as one administration official put it. Officials said Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates was playing a crucial role, balancing the case made by commanders with the skepticism of some civilians on Mr. Obama’s war council as the debate entered its final days.
A senior military officer said the developing strategy adopted General McChrystal’s central tenet. “We are no longer thinking about just destroying the enemy in a conventional way,” the officer said. “We must remove the main pressure that civilians live under, which is the constant intimidation and corruption and direct threat from the insurgency.”
But we still will likely be stuck with Karzai as president, with the election coming so close to winter and likely to cause a lower turnout in the north, which is a huge problem. That the CIA has his brother as a bag man has to also make the Karzais feel awfully comfortable. Never mind that Karzai’s government is making our job harder, with women under Karzai’s rule are in more danger, not less.
None of this bodes well for Pres. Obama. But he’s stuck with Afghanistan as we found it. His options are few and none of them very good, because contrary to the calls to get out, we can’t.
