Did Karzai play US 'like a fiddle' to help enrich heroin trade? RAW STORY

Published: Friday July 25, 2008





Print This Email This NYT: Is Afghanistan a Narco-State? In 2007, a plan to effectively eradicate most of Afghanistan's poppy fields took shape. It involved offering monetary support for farmers who would switch their crops to produce, rewards for poppy-free villages such as schools and roads, a concentrated campaign of aerial poppy spraying, and US military security for the Afghan army's ground-based eradication efforts. Yet time and time again, claims Thomas Schweich writing for the New York Times, the Department of Defense, not wanting to take up responsibility for a drug war alongside a shooting war, and an Afghan government saturated in narco-corruption from top to bottom with a president who "played us like a fiddle," have impeded the plan's implementation. Ultimately, some basic US efforts to encourage Afghan farmers to move away from opium only made it easier for them to produce and sell. But Afghanistan's booming opium production was not so much due to the US government's unwitting facilitation of the trade, or its bungling efforts to stomp it out, as the trechary of the country's leader, writes Schweich. "Karzai appointed a convicted heroin dealer, Izzatulla Wasifi, to head his anticorruption commission," the report claims. "Karzai also appointed several corrupt local police chiefs. There were numerous diplomatic reports that his brother Ahmed Wali, who was running half of Kandahar, was involved in the drug trade." In 2006, after a number of dust-ups between the D.E.A. and the US military, Benjamin Freakley, a two-star general, shut down all counternarcotics operations in "a key heroin-tracking province." The general claimed them to be a distraction from his military operations; and he was not alone in the sentiment. British soldiers too, when a small, ground-based Afghan poppy eradication was underway, passed out leaflets explaining to the people that they were not involved in it. Internal politics even led to US Defense Secretary Robert Gates testifying before Congress in 2007 that the DoD did not have a strategy for fighting the opium trade in Afghanistan. Turns out, they do, but pressure from all sides has prevented US authorities from pursuing its ends. "While it is true that Karzais Taliban enemies finance themselves from the drug trade, so do many of his supporters," writes Schweich. "At the same time, some of our NATO allies have resisted the anti-opium offensive, as has our own Defense Department, which tends to see counternarcotics as other peoples business to be settled once the war-fighting is over. The trouble is that the fighting is unlikely to end as long as the Taliban can finance themselves through drugs  and as long as the Kabul government is dependent on opium to sustain its own hold on power." Excerpts from article: # Karzai was playing us like a fiddle: the U.S. would spend billions of dollars on infrastructure improvement; the U.S. and its allies would fight the Taliban; Karzai's friends could get rich off the drug trade; he could blame the West for his problems; and in 2009 he would be elected to a new term. ... Back in January 2007, Karzai appointed a convicted heroin dealer, Izzatulla Wasifi, to head his anticorruption commission. Karzai also appointed several corrupt local police chiefs. There were numerous diplomatic reports that his brother Ahmed Wali, who was running half of Kandahar, was involved in the drug trade. (Said T. Jawad, Afghanistan's ambassador to the United States, said Karzai has "taken the step of issuing a decree asking the government to be vigilant of any business dealing involving his family, and requesting that any suspicions be fully investigated.") Some governors of Helmand and other provinces - Pashtuns who had advocated aerial eradication - changed their positions after the "palace" spoke to them. Karzai was lining up his Pashtun allies for re-election, and the drug war was going to have to wait. "Maybe we taught him too much about politics," Rice said to me after I briefed her on these developments.