Is Karzai's Brother a Drug Lord?
Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai's brother may be involved in the drug trade.
Actually, a majority of Afghans are involved in raising poppies or making and exporting heroin. A good third of the country's gross domestic product derives from the drug trade and 85% of Europe's heroin comes from Afghanistan.
Some of the Pushtuns the US and NATO call "Taliban" seem to me actually to just be villagers angry that US or Afghan troops forcibly eradicated their poppy crops.
A British commander has expressed doubts that an "absolute military victory" can be won in Afghanistan and suggested negotiating with the Taliban.
President Karzai is way ahead of him, and has asked the Saudis to help mediate the conflict.
Meanwhile, NATO and the US continued their search and destroy missions, killing 12 "Taliban" in Jalai, it was announced on Saturday.
posted by Juan Cole @ 10/05/2008 01:03:00 AM
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10 Comments:
Oh...BIG F'ING SURPRISE! The only question is, who decided to leak it and why?
Professor Cole,
You use quotes around Taliban: "killing 12 "Taliban" in Jalai...". More writers should. There is nothing at all certain about any claims made by the US military as to the identity of those they kill. "We don't do body counts" covered not only Iraqi anti-occupation freedom fighters (many, probably most, were freedom fighters for Iraq, and quotes around freedom fighters aren't appropriate), but also Iraqi civilians, utterly innocent people. Virtually all the identities of people killed by the US military should be suspect, because the list is now exceedingly (and heartbreakingly) long of military claims being found to be less than truthful--that is, where innocent Iraqis were killed and added to the insurgent or Al Qaeda dead list like some trophy or proof of success. Official Pentagon press releases ALWAYS carefully include "suspected" as a required modifier in any report of who the US military kills. My guess by now, 2008, is that military suspicion equates to miltary certainty, meaning some of you Iraqis are guilty (and dead too) because some nervous National Guardsman who should rightly have been installing sprinkler systems or selling carpet safe in his home town, was scared out of his wits and pulled the trigger because he didn't have a clue that you were saying "please don't kill me.". The military is, of course forgiving to their own. The reality is we don't really check up on who it was that we killed, and we don't really know enough about Iraq, even after our years there, to make very many decisions at all about what unarmed people are ok to be killed, and which are not. If the US military had, over the years, actually been truthful about when they killed innocent Iraqis, they might have more friends, simply for having the truth. But they needed to CYA from the get-go for trigger happy, nervous teens in full military makeup. The military has now accumulated too many mistakes to be believed, resulting in the most likely opinion of an Iraqi being that once again, some "lowly" Iraqi died, and some American soldier intent on his own myth of freedom went scott free. There is only one conclusion to this kind of untruthfullness: an ever increasing certitude of the native populace to kick the bastards out, the bastards being the Americans. Which is my country, andt he country of my family. Which doesn't make me at all happy.
This problem is systemic. The US military was supposed to have learned from Viet Nam not do do this. They said they had learned, made a big deal outof it. But they didn't and went out and did it all over again. How long should this kind of ineptitude be tolerated?
Bottom line is that many Iraqis that are derided by "patriotic" (quotes deserved there) Americans are doing EXACTLY what those same "patriotic" Americans like to THINK they would do if someone invaded the US. "Remember the Alamo", and all those other slogans.....That Amnericans cannot see this speaks volumes to the imagination ability they have lost, and the compassion they have given up as being naieve.
Fraternity in Poppystan
Profound difficulties are also to be found among the lucrative blooms in Afghanistan's luscious poppy fields. The NATO mission has made no serious attempt to bring about a significant reduction in the heroin trade. How could it? Karzai's own supporters, few in number though [241] they are, would rapidly desert if any attempts were made to stop their trading activities. It would require massive state help to agriculture and cottage industries over many years to reduce the dependence on poppy farming. Ninety percent of the world's opium production is based in Afghanistan. UN estimates suggest that heroin accounts for 52 percent of the impoverished country's gross domestic product, and the opium sector of agriculture continues to grow apace. Indeed, these have been persistent allegations--just as persistently denied by their subject--that President Karzai's younger brother, AHMAD WALI KARZAI, has become one of the richest drug barons in the country. At a meeting with Pakistan's president in 2006, when Karzai was bleating on about Pakistan's inability to stop cross-border smuggling, General Musharraf calmly suggested that perhaps Karzai should set an example by bringing his sibling under control. The hatred for each other of these two close allies of Washington is not a secret in this region.
Added to the opium problem are the corruptions of the elite, which grow each month like an untreated tumor. Western funds designed to aid reconstruction were siphoned off to build fancy homes for their native enforcers. As early as 2002, in a gigantic housing scandal, cabinet ministers awarded themselves and favored cronies prime real estate in Kabul. Land prices in the city had reached a high point after the occupation, when the occupiers, NGO employees, and their camp followers built large villas for themselves in full view of the poor.
Then there is, of course, the resistance. [&c. &c.]
Ali, Tariq. The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power. New York: Scribner, 2008.
Then there is, of course, the fact that anybody who refers to Global Tourism as "the resistance" must be some kind of subversive left-winger.
"Rather a confused book at times, but it has a lot of information that will probably take years to seep into the New York Times."
--Internet Critic
Happy days.
It's a curious situation in Afghanistan. The local farmers are quite good at growing opium poppies but they seem not so successful at growing enough food to feed the population.
* * Faced with its own food problems, Pakistan banned the commercial export of flour to Afghanistan. Even in a good year, Afghanistan needs to import half a million tonnes of grain to feed itself, the majority of that from Pakistan.
Earlier this week, after high-level meetings, Islamabad softened its position, approving the export of 50,000 tonnes of wheat to Afghanistan to ease the situation, on a government-to-government basis, but commercial sales remain prohibited.
* * * Successful anti-poppy campaigns in the country's north and east were mainly to thank for the [19%] drop in production but fields in the south -- where the Taliban insurgency is strongest -- remain awash in poppies, which provide the main ingredient for heroin, a U.N. report said.
And because of a rise in yield, opium production this year will fall only 6 percent compared with last year's record haul and the Taliban stand to again earn tens of millions of dollars from the drug trade.
Last year opium farmers cultivated 476,903 acres; this year they cultivated 388,000 acres.
If international food donations were ended I wonder if the Afghanis themselves would sort out the situation and turn those poppy fields into fields of wheat and other food staples. Opium and heroin bring in much more money than do potatoes of course but as long as the international community continues to make up for the shortfall of food in Afghanistan what they're doing is "enabling" the poppy growers, to use the current fashionable term.
Griff, don't you believe in the principles of free trade? Adam Smith explained that each person or country should make cash doing what it knows best, then use the cash to import what it needs. Specialization of labor. Same way the US makes stupid movies, toxic bonds, commercials, and exotic weapons and exports them to raise cash to import every actual working device it needs from China and all its physical laborers from Mexico. If you make $1000 growing opium on the same land that would net you ten pounds of potatoes, what do you do?
Mr. Griffin:
What you write presumes two things -- Afghani farmers are free to plant whatever they want. If they were to plant food crops, the harvest would suffice to replace international aid, and that the needed transportation, storage, and distribution infrastructure exists.
In many cases opium farmers are tenants. They plant what they are told, and in return are allowed a meager existence. As to my second point, such infrastructure does not exist.
Adam Smith explained that each person or country should make cash doing what it knows best, then use the cash to import what it needs.
Super390 -- Fair point, and that theory just may work in some places but it doesn't seem to be working in Afghanistan. Much of the food the Afghanis receive is donated by NGOs and international government cooperatives such as the World Food Organization. It's a handout. Adam Smith wouldn't approve of that. He was a proponent of self-sufficiency through specialization, by which he meant being really good at one thing or a few things, selling those things and thereby raising cash to buy other people's goods and services. Depending upon the kindness of neighbors and strangers was never part of his equation. I did detect your spirit of irony and good humor of course and agree with your comments regarding America's recent "contributions" to the planet.
In many cases opium farmers are tenants. They plant what they are told, and in return are allowed a meager existence. As to my second point, such infrastructure does not exist.
Mr or Ms pluky -- Another fair couple of points but you must have missed my original remark "...I wonder if the Afghanis themselves would sort out the situation..."
I was referring to what the British used to call Rule .303. As in Enfield. That rule does apply to landlords and local tyrants.
I'll stipulate that Afghanistan is lacking infrastructure. I'm sure that their storage and delivery networks are sub-par. But they do somehow manage to distribute the food donations they receive from international organizations. So if Afghani farmers raise food in sufficient quantities to theoretically feed the population in 2009 but lose significant portions of the crop to poor infrastructure I would expect that any self styled National Government would identify and address those critical problem areas during the 2010 season and into the future. The National Government does seem to do a satisfactory job of distributing the donated food it receives. One final point: If a person (or family) chooses to live on an inaccessible mountain top or remote valley with no roads leading in or out it seems to me that he'd better enter into that bargain being prepared to fend for himself. Starvation would be a clear and obvious possibility for anyone choosing that lifestyle. It would not be practical for or expected of a National Government to provide road and bridge etc. infrastructure to a relatively small tribe of people who have voluntarily moved to the far side of that mountain way off yonder.
Simple solution to the poppy problem: mandate that an international body, the UN, buy the whole crop. At reasonable price for a guaranteed number of years. For use in the pharmaceutical industry.
I heard Mr. Karzai's brother worked in a restaurant in Chicago. Maybe it's another brother who's the drug runner?
Much has been made of the Karzai family being some kind of hereditary nobility--it's all hooey. "Noble families" are as common as mushrooms in Afghanistan; it doesn't mean anything. Karzai was chosen because he was good looking, photogenic, and malleable in the hands of the West. Karzai has no more claim to lead Afghanistan than any other middle class or even poor person.
Then there's those elections, but they mean so little. Pakistan and Afghanistan both suffer from a dearth of decent leaders. Criminal gangs run the show there, and any contender who arrives on the scene who is competent and truthful is killed before he can get very far, should he be so foolish as to challenge the thugs. Nawaz Sharif is a drug lord, too--that's how it is there. It's incredibly sad.
Russia Today posted a story that the US military was involved in the Afghan drug trade : which would be straight out of the Iran/Contra or Vietnam 'Air America' playbook.
The seeming mystery of Afghanistan's value - the West has been meddling in the place just like other Imperial forces before - has kept the locals from dealing with the problem : which is meddling foreigners.
It's really a wonder our people - who mostly don't speak the langauage, share culture or religion, know the land or people, or have any vested interest in keeping the peace; nor are they trained and equipped to do anything more than cause chaos ; don't do a better job of promoting somebody else's national integrity. ( When have they ever done that ? )
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