Karzai Family Values: Smoke But No Fire on Opium Connection

Obama administration officials are not exactly crowding the podiums to deny Wednesday's New York Times allegation that Ahmed Wali Karzai, a brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, has been receiving payments from the CIA for years. Curiously, however, some Washington officials are stepping forward to urge caution regarding allegations that Ahmed Wali is, as the Times also put it, "a suspected player in the country's booming illegal opium trade." As Declassified reported yesterday, current and former U.S. officials say it should be no surprise that the CIA would be purchasing the goodwill of Karzai's brother and perhaps many other members of the Afghan leader's circle. But in its own reporting, the Times was less emphatic about Ahmed Wali's alleged drug connections than on his alleged relationship with the CIA. "Our assumption is that he's benefiting from the drug trade," the Times quoted one American officer as saying, while also citing other military and political officials who characterized the evidence of Ahmed Wali's involvement with drugs as "largely circumstantial."

U.S. officials contacted by NEWSWEEK indicated that considerable effort had been devoted toward examining Ahmed Wali's possible involvement with traffickers but said that government reporting on the matter was not the kind of evidence that could be used in a criminal prosecution.

"There isn't proof of [Ahmed Wali] Karzai's involvement in the drug trade," said one U.S. official familiar with intelligence on the subject, who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive information. "Rumors and suspicions are one thing; evidence that would stand up in court is another. Karzai's a tough guy in a tough neighborhood. But if someone can demonstrate that he's a trafficker, or that he funds people killing our troops, they haven't come forward. And believe me, the question's been asked." A Western official familiar with Afghan developments added that while "no one knows whether all the rumors [about Ahmed Wali] are true...Afghans themselves see him as a major drug figure." This perception alone, the official said, hurts the credibility of the Karzai government and plays into the propaganda themes of Taliban insurgents.

Some indication of the ambiguities in U.S. intelligence on Ahmed Wali Karzai's alleged drug ties—and the consequent ambiguities in U.S. policy toward him and his brother—are provided by recent seemingly contradictory statements made about Ahmed Wali by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and its chair, Sen. John Kerry, who has become a close administration collaborator on foreign-policy issues. Following a recent visit to Afghanistan during which he met with Hamid Karzai, Kerry was questioned about his trip after a speech on the subject to the Council on Foreign Relations. According to a Reuters report, Kerry's response was that nobody had produced any evidence to support allegations that Ahmed Wali was involved in drug trafficking. "I have requested from our intelligence sources and law enforcement folks the smoking gun, the evidence... Nobody has [produced it]," Kerry said.

A few weeks earlier, however, Kerry's own Foreign Relations Committee had issued a report on "Afghanistan's Narco War", which included anecdotal information about Ahmed Wali's purported drug involvement (see page 11), including allegations that "Afghan police and military commanders who seize drugs in southern Afghanistan have been told by Ahmed Wali to return them to the traffickers, how he arranged the imprisonment of a DEA informant who had tipped the Americans to a drug-laden truck near Kabul [and] how his accusers often turn up dead." The report acknowledged that no proof of these stories had surfaced, and that Abu Wali and Hamid Karzai have denied the accusations.

According to the committee report, in one recent discussion of Ahmed Wali's reputation, a senior U.S. diplomat, his British counterpart, and the local station chiefs of their two intelligence services met with President Karzai. The American diplomat told Kerry aides that he had suggested to President Karzai that his brother was involved in drugs and that perhaps he should be sent abroad as an Afghan ambassador instead. ''Is there hard evidence that my brother has drug links?'' asked President Karzai, according to the diplomat. ''There is no evidence in a judicial sense,'' said the diplomat. ''There is rumor and circumstantial evidence.'' Ahmed Wali Karzai denied to the Times that he was involved with drug traffickers and that he had taken money from the CIA, and he told author Gerald Posner, in an interview for the Daily Beast, that while he had "worked with Americans" since 2001, he hadn't been paid by the CIA and wasn't involved with drugs.

Following the Times story that tied Ahmed Wali both to CIA payments and the drug trade, Kerry issued a press release that questioned whether administration officials had been straight with Congress. "Senior American officials have told me repeatedly that there is no hard evidence linking Ahmed Wali Karzai to drug trafficking. However, after reading press accounts which allege that Mr. Karzai has been on the payroll of the CIA, one of the agencies gathering intelligence about narcotics trafficking in Afghanistan, I have serious questions about the information that Congress is receiving," Kerry wrote. While adding that neither Ahmed Wali nor Hamid Karzai should be condemned based on rumors or news reports, Kerry declared that "the appropriate congressional committees must be immediately provided with the most comprehensive and untainted information about his alleged entanglements." But members of congressional intelligence committees are supposed to be kept informed by the CIA and other agencies about undercover operations abroad, and at this point, it remains unclear whether anyone was briefed, and if so, who. As blogger Spencer Ackerman notes, committee members are not exactly hurrying to discuss what they have—or have not—been told regarding the CIA's dealings with Ahmed Wali Karzai.