Over the years, dating back to the 1950s, the CIA has been accused on more than one occasion of being involved with drug smuggling, from Vietnam and Laos to Venezuela. The Company has been cited as either indirectly assisting those who were smuggling drugs, turning a blind eye, say, to the contras in Nicaragua, or of using them, as in Vietnam, to provide funding for covert missions. Proof, of course, given the nature of the CIA itself, has been difficult to come by, to say the least.
Now there is a new allegation, which could have significant fall-out for the Obama administration. Dexter Filkins, Mark Mazzetti and James Risen of The New York Times write that:
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 agency pays Mr. Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home.
The financial ties and close working relationship between the intelligence agency and Mr. Karzai raise significant questions about America’s war strategy, which is currently under review at the White House.
[...]
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.
"If we are going to conduct a population-centric strategy in Afghanistan, and we are perceived as backing thugs, then we are just undermining ourselves," said Maj. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the senior American military intelligence official in Afghanistan.
While there is no proof that Karzai is engaged in drug trafficking, and he has denied it, military and political officials in the Obama administration say the circumstantial evidence strongly implies that the Afghan president's brother has enriched himself in the illegal poppy trade.
Other Western officials pointed to evidence that Ahmed Wali Karzai orchestrated the manufacture of hundreds of thousands of phony ballots for his brother’s re-election effort in August. He is also believed to have been responsible for setting up dozens of so-called ghost polling stations — existing only on paper — that were used to manufacture tens of thousands of phony ballots.
"The only way to clean up Chicago is to get rid of Capone," General Flynn said.
The Times cited officials as saying that U.S. efforts against other Afghan drug lords may have strengthened Karzai's influence over the drug trade.
In a speech Monday, Sen. John Kerry said:
If effective governance is to take hold—and I believe our mission depends on it—then our Afghan partners must tackle corruption at the highest levels. The fact that the Afghan government has not prosecuted a single high-level drug trafficker damages all our other efforts because it goes to the question of credibility. The narcotics trade – which generates about 90% of the world’s heroin and $3 billion a year in profits – not only fuels the insurgency, but also finances the corruption that corrodes governance.
Kerry also answered a question after his speech from Barbara Slavin of The Washington Times:
SLAVIN: Senator Kerry, you spoke about corruption at the highest levels in Afghanistan. What makes you think that President Karzai, who presumably will be reelected, is able to control this when there are reports that his own brother is involved in the drug trade?
And may I also ask a second, if I can slip it in, and that is the question of morale of American forces. You say that the Obama administration has to take its time deliberating. But what is the impact that this is having on forces who are already there and who are dying as this war goes on?
KERRY: Well, let me -- you know, I hope I'm not violating any confidence in sharing this with you, but I think it's important, so I'll put it out there.
During our walk, we had a very direct conversation about that. In fact, he asked me about it, he raised the subject, quite interesting. And we talked about the perceptions of his brother.
Let me just say this in answer to this. I have requested from our intelligence sources and law enforcement folks the smoking gun, the evidence. Show me, what do we know? (Ben's ?) head is nodding. And I'll tell you right now, folks, nobody has, nobody has. Nobody has given me the sort of hard-and-fast here's what we heard him say, or here's what we caught him doing, or here's what he's involved in, et cetera, so this swirls around.
And you know, there are lots of different stories like that that swirl around. Now, I'm not going to go into all of the conversation I had with the president. I think there are things that Ahmed Wali Karzai has done that haven't been helpful. There are things he does that are very helpful for us. And we need to look hard at the balance of how we can best manage Kandahar and that particular region.
I am confident that that is a conversation that is going to be engaged in very, very soon with the president. And it ought to be done at that level, not here.
But we are all very sensitive to those stories and to the impact on folks out there. For the moment, you know, we're walking by the poppies, we're not destroying them, because we have learned that it is counterproductive to do that unless you have a replacement. And so I think we've gotten smarter.
The immediate demand is security, and then you can, once you've got security, bring the people in who will begin to work on the crop substitution, on the alternative seeds and crops and so forth. And we can begin to change it.
If all you do is destroy their livelihood and there's no substitution for it, you're creating Taliban or whatever, certainly neutrality. So I think we've gotten smarter.
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calchala is also discussing this here as is absdoggy here.