AUGUST 2007

"Covering up Karzai & Co."

by Arthur Kent

Institute for Research on Public Policy ~~ Quebec, Canada
Policy Options July 2007

It’s not the Harper government that’s principally to blame for
prisoner abuse and other Afghan scandals  it’s the den of thieves it’s
protecting. The way Abdul Rab sees it, he and his family are enduring
several wars, throwing challenges in their path every day. This
morning, behind the wheel of his big 4x4, bullying a path through the
traffic of Kabul, his dark and tired features are set with particular
purpose, and a degree of enthusiasm. It’s not his family’s battle for
economic survival that he’s concerned with just now, or the struggle
for his children’s education, and much less for his country:
Afghanistan, he feels, is beyond hope.

Abdul Rab’s mind, just now, is focused on the war he wages as a
professional, as an undercover officer of Afghanistan’s national
security forces. He’s on his way to meet an informant, part of the
network he’s assembled, over the years, to probe the netherworld of
Pakistan’s tribal areas, on Afghanistan’s southern border. “There is
word of my man,” he explains between calls on his cellphone. “We came
very close to catching him last year, when he came to Kandahar from
Quetta on an operation. Now he’s in Peshawar. He’s coming here. I’m
sure of it.”

As he speaks, he produces a 9-mm pistol from beneath his belt and
places it on the console, in easy reach. He smiles: nothing would make
Abdul Rab’s day like picking up a few solid facts about the movements
of his man  an al Qaeda field operative he’s been tracking for three
years, a facilitator who arms suicide bombers and dispatches them on
their missions. The terrorist is an adversary, someone Abdul Rab can
try to capture or kill. In short, an enemy he can deal with.

It’s Abdul Rab’s other wars that wear him down, that make him sigh
with fatigue and discouragement. “What do you see there?” he asks,
pointing at the rear-view mirror. He’s not talking about the donkey
carts and taxis. “It’s Kabul, the home of our worst enemies. All the
big people, working for themselves. And against us, against Afghanistan.”

He tells the story of a colleague, a general in the Karzai regime’s
Interior Ministry, which oversees policing throughout the country. The
General was driving north from the capital one day, when he came
across a police officer beating a man at a checkpoint. The General
stopped and confronted the officer, ordering him to stop. “The General
asked what the man had done to deserve such a beating,” Abdul Rab
says. “ ‘Smuggling,’ the policeman told him. But there were no drugs
or other goods in the car. The policeman was just after money.”

This stop-and-bribe practice by corrupt policemen led to a strike by
Afghan truckers in April. Known as mushkil tarashi, the bribes can
cost long-distance drivers up to $10,000 a year. Hauling freight
across the country, say from Iran to Pakistan’s Khyber Pass, a trucker
could be stopped 400 times. In this case, the driver was lucky: the
general who rescued him from the policeman’s fists also happens to be
stridently honest. Still, the crooked cop defied his order to free the
driver, instead pulling out his cell-phone. “He called Zarar’s
office,” Abdul Rab says, laughing, “and spoke to Zarar himself.”

Zarar Ahmad Muqbul is President Hamid Karzai’s minister of the
interior. The checkpoint was located in Zarar’s hometown of Charikar,
north of Kabul. After a brief conversation, the police officer
reported that the Minister had ordered the car impounded and the
driver arrested. Both were taken back to Kabul. Later in the day,
Minister Zarar alleged that the General was secretly in league with
the driver, smuggling heroin. “It came down to two stories,” Abdul Rab
says. “So the honest people at the ministry had a choice. Either they
would believe their general or the Minister.”

Abdul Rab’s tale might seem grim enough if Minister Zarar were just a
small-time hood, using local cronies to put the squeeze on passing
truckers. But the multi-tiered graft afflicting Zarar’s department is
so chronic, so extensive and so resistant to correction that the
Interior Ministry is regarded by most seasoned Afghan observers as one
of the most corrupt branches of the Western-backed Afghan regime. So
much international aid money has vanished into the concentric rings of
corruption that make up the Karzai administration that no reliable
estimate exists of its total dollar value. Similarly, Foreign Affairs
officials in Ottawa have resisted repeated requests, for the purposes
of this article, to estimate the total sum of Canadian aid to Afghanistan.

Prime Minister Harper is fond of saying that the Afghan mission
constitutes Canada’s largest single foreign aid package. But ask for a
number, and you’ll be invited to surf through a half-dozen ministerial
websites to come up with a figure of your own. And there’s no boasting
in Ottawa about the auditing of these Canadian tax dollars once they
begin making their way through the many outstretched palms in Kabul.
When millions go missing  as in the case of the embezzled police
salaries we’ll examine here  the blame game among embassies, aid
agencies and the UN resembles a buzkashi match, in which Afghan
horsemen scramble over the carcass of a headless goat.

The sheer scope of fraud within the regime’s ministries has caused a
collapse of public trust. So much so that Hamid Karzai’s corrupt
dominion arguably constitutes a greater threat to the long-term
security of Afghanistan than anything those backcountry no-hopers
known as the Taliban are capable of mustering on the battlefield. Yet
Canadians have had little exposure to the troubling duality of their
country’s efforts in Afghanistan, distracted as they are by the fog of
political war on the floor of the House of Commons over flashpoint
issues like the mishandling of prisoners taken on the battlefield
itself a consequence of untrustworthy Afghan authorities.

The Taliban are suffering an acute operational crisis brought about,
to no small degree, by the great skill and determination being shown
by the Canadian Forces. But the troops’ political masters are
squandering this advantage, as proven by the evidence lurking just
beneath the surface of the affairs of state in Kabul. The Harper
government, by accepting a subservient role to the Bush
administration’s deeply flawed political and diplomatic approach to
Afghanistan, has allowed itself to become trapped into providing
public relations cover for a Kabul regime that is desperately in need
of a complete overhaul. Rather than trying to effect the necessary
repairs, Canadian diplomats and civil servants have been reduced to
two main functions: making excuses for the regime’s failures, and
lowering expectations for the future.
Afghanistan’s genuine democrats say that by perpetuating the Karzai
administration’s myth of viability, nations like Canada are smothering
attempts to root out corruption and get on with winning the peace. “It
is a disaster for the Afghan people,” despairs Ramazan Bashar Dost, a
popular member of Parliament from Kabul. “Mr. Karzai doesn’t really
want to fight corruption, and the international community, too,
doesn’t have the will to fight corruption in Afghanistan.”

Doubters may refer to Abdul Rab. What are his plans, once he nails his
man? This front-line counterterrorism specialist, this dedicated and
accomplished Western ally in the fight against al-Qaeda, says he and
his family are clearing out. “There is no future for Afghanistan. When
my war is finished with this killer, we will leave.”

A walk through the crumbling architecture of the Karzai regime is like
stumbling through a funhouse on the midway, with warped mirrors
reflecting a weird array of characters, all of them darting
mischievously among the shadows. Some, in truth, are honourable
appointees, trying their best for the country, while others are
imposters, clowns  and, predominantly, villains.

The man at the top, Hamid Karzai, was once portrayed as his nation’s
great hope. His greatest success was his
malleability: in his American mentors’ hands, he became a stylish
projection of leadership, a media darling. But after five years of
waiting in vain for basic services (electricity is still unreliable,
even in Kabul, where only one in five citizens receives piped water
supplies), many Afghans, including some of the President’s leading
political allies, have had enough.
Kabul MP Shukria Barakzai traces Karzai’s undoing all the way back to
his installation as interim leader in December 2001, a month after the
Taliban fled Kabul in the face of a post-9/11, US-led assault. Both at
that juncture, and at the subsequent conference in Bonn, Germany,
which created the governing infrastructure Afghans endure today, the
Bush administration was in the driver’s seat. “The Bonn agreement was
a very bad start for a new political life in Afghanistan,” says
Barakzai, who had a hand in writing the country’s new constitution.
“The old criminals were given new places. It was difficult for Mr.
Karzai, as president, without any soldiers, without a penny in the
government’s pocket, while the cabinet was full of malicious leaders,
warlords and people with direct connections to drug money.” Barakzai
says she no longer supports Karzai “because he simply hasn’t done his
best” in the past five years to reduce his vulnerability to the
scoundrels in and around his palace. Instead, she says, he’s become
more dependent on them.

Witness the career path of Interior Minister Zarar Ahmad Muqbul.
Zarar’s predecessor, Ali Jalali, is a respected, reform-minded
administrator. But he resigned as minister in 2005 over Karzai’s
failure to support him in ridding areas under his jurisdiction of
corruption. Specifically, Jalali had insisted on the dismissal of a
reviled regional strongman named Gul Agha Sherzai, who had been
granted the governorship of Kandahar province after the collapse of
the Taliban regime. Karzai’s family, however, maintains close ties to
Gul Agha. The president’s solution was to airlift the old rogue to
Jalalabad, where he became governor of Nangahar province  thus
spreading the mantle of corruption, rather than containing it. When
Jalali stepped down, Karzai replaced him with his undistinguished
deputy, Zarar.

Since then, another figure has taken Gul Agha’s place as the most
suspicious man of means in Kandahar: Wali Karzai, the President’s
younger brother. At a news conference in March, reporters in Kabul
asked openly if widespread rumours of Wali’s connections with
Kandahar’s drug trade are being investigated. “That’s just anti-Karzai
propaganda,” came the reply from the President’s attorney general,
Abdul Jabar Sabet. “I’ve seen no evidence of this.” Could this be
because the Attorney General is looking the other way? That’s the
suspicion of Sabet’s critics in Parliament. Supporters of one of his
victims, the respected former chief of border police at Kabul Airport,
General Aminullah Amerkhel, don’t mince words: Sabet, they say, was
acting on behalf of Kabul’s leading druglords when he had Amerkhel
removed from his post last October.

Circumstantial evidence appears damning. Amerkhel was an accomplished
drug-buster: his face had become well known to viewers of
Afghanistan’s TV news channels as he and his men nabbed smugglers
almost daily. Then, last year, he challenged corruption up the chain
of command. He told reporters that too often, he would arrest a
courier  kilogram bags of pure heroin in hand  only to see the
smuggler released the next day, on orders from above. Since Amerkhel’s
suspension by Sabet, arrests have plummeted. Only five traffickers
have been collared at the airport in the past six months. Amerkhel
regularly racked up five or six per week. So is Hamid Karzai’s
attorney general really in league with the heroin gangs? It’s a
question that should interest the government of Canada for at least
two reasons. First, heroin profits help finance the Taliban’s war
effort. Second, Sabet boasts to friends of enjoying residency in
Canada: his wife and children live in Montreal. Yet officials in
Ottawa  at Foreign Affairs, Immigration and the Prime Minister’s
Office  have refused since mid-March to confirm the status of
President Karzai’s attorney general.

Sabet’s past is littered with reasons that he should never have gained
entry into Canada, particularly his long history of association with
the black prince of Afghan extremists, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Sabet was
a longtime counsellor to Hekmatyar, once the United States’
most-favoured anti-Soviet guerrilla leader but now on their
most-wanted list of terrorists. In 1992, Sabet’s continuing links with
Hekmatyar led to his dismissal from a job at the Voice of America in
Washington, D.C. He was denied residency in the United States. Sabet
turned next to Canada, immigrating with his family to Montreal in
1999, where he became a familiar face at the downtown mosque Masjid
as-Salam. Sources within Montreal’s Afghan community confirm that
Sabet portrayed himself as a simple refugee to gain residency, and
that he failed to disclose the previous denial of re-entry into the
US. Thus he allegedly by committed two “material misrepresentations”
with regard to Canadian regulations. Sabet returned to Kabul in 2003,
where he picked up a lawyer’s position at the Interior Ministry. Then,
in an ironic twist typical of US policy in Afghanistan, Sabet used his
smooth command of English to form a relationship with a US Justice
Department adviser who was seeking favourable reviews of the
Guantanamo Bay detention camp. As a result, Sabet led an Afghan
government inspection of the site, declaring afterward that there were
“only one or two” complaints from prisoners, and that “conditions of
the jail were humane. The rumours about prison conditions were all
wrong.” Soon after, both the US and British embassies in Kabul began
lobbying for Sabet’s promotion, according to an aide of President
Karzai’s who witnessed the sessions. Sabet was nominated as attorney
general just months later. How that nomination was approved by
Parliament says much about the power structure in Kabul. In order to
ensure enough votes for Sabet, a deal was brokered by Karzai’s aides
between the candidate and a key Karzai ally, Abdul Sayyaf.

This brigand is one of Afghanistan’s most feared warlords, a leading
force of disunity among the militias that devastated Kabul in the
civil war of the early 1990s. Today, Sayyaf’s an MP  and leader of the
parliamentary minority. In return for Sabet lending support to the
controversial amnesty bill that Sayyaf and other accused war criminals
pushed through the House earlier this year, the nominee secured his
confirmation as attorney general. Since then, Sayyaf’s hold over Sabet
has strengthened. Sayyaf is frequently accused of land grabbing by
citizens of villages to the west and north of the capital. A British
lawyer happened to be in Sabet’s office when one such dispute came
forward. A grieving widow alleged that her home had been occupied by
one of Sayyaf’s militia commanders. The attorney general listened for
a time, then leaned across his desk and yanked the letter of complaint
from the widow’s hands. He tore it up and ordered her to leave.

According to a senior Justice Ministry source, most if not all of
Sabet’s key staff appointments have been cleared through Sayyaf,
particularly that of his deputy of narcotics affairs, General
Stanakzai. This left Sayyaf with two trusted henchmen in key
counter-narcotics posts: earlier, he had used his influence to place a
close aide named Sadat in the Interior Ministry’s hierarchy.

Sabet, meanwhile, has been equally determined to succeed in the game
of connections. Just days after securing the attorney general’s chair,
he elevated a minor police officer named Nadir Hamidi to the rank of
full general and made him his deputy. Within weeks, General Nadir
known widely as “Choor,” or briber  fled Afghanistan to Dubai, his
pockets stuffed with several hundred thousand dollars of state funds.

Sabet ducked accusations that he’d helped Nadir escape. Then he made
an even more disruptive appointment. General Kasim is a former
security chief of Baghlan province, north of Kabul. A Hekmatyar
loyalist like Sabet, he was facing corruption charges  until the
Attorney General had his file wiped clean and installed him as chief
of Kabul’s District Ten police station.

T here, he’s been a useful tool for Sabet’s barnstorming “anti-vice”
raids on foreign-owned Kabul restaurants. (In one incident in
February, Kasim’s men helped themselves to seized alcohol, according
to foreign aid workers who witnessed the raid. An hour later, one of
the expats was stopped at a checkpoint and beaten by policemen “whose
breath reeked of vodka.” He filed a complaint, which now languishes at
the Interior Ministry.)

More spectacularly, Kasim and his men have been the Attorney General’s
storm troopers in putting the squeeze on Kabul’s vibrant young news
media. On April 17, enraged by the coverage of one of his speeches by
Tolo TV, Afghanistan’s most popular independent channel, Sabet ordered
Kasim and more than a hundred armed policemen to bring the errant
journalists to his office. The police stormed Tolo TV’s studios,
arresting seven journalists, including four from other agencies
covering the raid. Several of the reporters were riflebutted and
punched. All of this occurred without warrants, as in the Amerkhel
case. Saad Mohseni, Tolo TV’s director, protested:
“Sabet has shown that he is totally unfit to hold his position. Our
international allies must tell the President this type of official is
not acceptable to the Afghan people.”

The UN agreed, denouncing the raid as “unlawful.” But from the US and
its NATO allies, including Canada, there has been only silence.
President Karzai, feeling no heat from his foreign sponsors and
pressured by allies like Sayyaf, an avowed foe of the news media, had
only this to say:
“The Attorney General we have today is one that is in a head-on clash
with the bad guys.”
The concurrent practices of going soft on criminals while cracking
down on the media should tell the people of Western democracies
everything they need to know about the Karzai regime, say its critics.
“We are facing the old difficulties of Afghanistan’s history in the
last 25 years,” says Shukria Barakzai. “Who is there who isn’t working
for his own pocket, who is there who isn’t a warlord or criminal?
“The President is completely isolated from the people. He only listens
to this mafia group inside the palace.” Whose reach, the evidence
shows, goes far into the countryside.

Z abul province sprawls northward from the Pakistan border in epic
sweeps of desert landscape. Zabul’s poverty is relieved only by the
traffic flowing along the highway from Kabul in the east to the
neighbouring province of Kandahar in the west. Zabul is preyed upon by
the Taliban, who move arms and men through the backcountry and
regularly attack remote police and army posts. In March of 2006, the
Governor of Zabul, an imaginative and successful administrator named
Delbar Arman, made a direct plea to the visiting commander of US and
coalition troops in the region, General David Fraser of Canada. Please
ensure, he asked, that President Karzai and his functionaries pay
Afghanistan’s policemen, in full and on time. Many officers and men in
Zabul’s most restive districts hadn’t received their salaries in three
months. Fraser, who believes that Arman is the kind of leader the
international community needs to support, relayed the request up the
chain of command.

Then politicians and bureaucrats got involved, both Western and
Afghan. One year later, Zabul’s police salaries are four months in
arrears, a shameful betrayal of a province viewed by the US and NATO
as an indicator of the Taliban’s capabilities. In early June, Taliban
gunmen attacked a police convoy in Zabul’s Shahjoy district. Sixteen
policemen died in the fighting. A UN-administered program called the
Law and Order Trust Fund for Afghanistan, or LOTFA, was launched four
years ago to distribute policemen’s pay. Canada is one of 13 nations
bankrolling the fund, along with the European Union and the UN. This
year Canadian taxpayers will donate $30 million to the effort. Trouble
is, LOTFA has yet to come up with a way to place international aid
directly into the hands of individual policemen. For now, the money
must first find a way through  yes  the Karzai regime’s Interior
Ministry, and across the palms of people like Minister Zarar.

A ccording to one general at the ministry, who laments the “losing
battle” against corruption fought by honest officials and staff
members, up to 30 percent of the department’s foreign-donated finances
go astray. Routinely, he says, at least one-tenth of provincial police
funding is embezzled, mainly by officials posted to the ministry’s
headquarters in Kabul. The withholding of money for salaries for many
months, he explains, helps conceal the crimes. Canada has police and
military officers stationed within the Interior Ministry, as does the
US State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law
Enforcement Affairs. In Ottawa, Foreign Affairs responded to queries
about the Zabul scandal only by pointing a finger at the United
Nations. “LOTFA is subject to the internal and external auditing
procedures provided for in the financial regulations, rules and
directives of the [United Nations Development Programme].”

This foreign bureaucratic smokescreen is matched on the regime’s side
by a determination to deceive at every level. For instance, President
Karzai’s General Independent Administration of Anti Corruption and
Bribery. This body has a staff of more than one hundred, who have
toiled for 18 months without a single substantial conviction. In this
context, Canadians and other foreign sponsors of the Karzai regime
need not wonder where so many of their tax dollars are winding up.

The footnote to this litany of wrongdoing is the damage it is
inflicting on Canada’s own political culture. Governments can be
expected to spin and evade and make every effort to keep the public in
the dark about the grimy underside of contentious issues. Journalists
depend upon this kind of official evasion. It gives us a raison
d’être, a mission to reveal and explain. But it would be remiss of
this correspondent, after 28 years of reporting regularly from
Afghanistan, to fail to point out the remarkable degree of secrecy
maintained by the Harper government regarding Canada’s Afghan
initiatives. Even the Kremlin was less manic in its information
control during the Soviet occupation of the 1980s. It is
regrettable to report that perhaps the only undisputed policy success
in Afghanistan chalked up by the Prime Minister’s Office is the
complete stifling of virtually every public servant concerned with any
aspect of the mission. In Ottawa, one high-ranking official with
oversight responsibilities in several of the areas covered by this
article contacted me after hours, “ashamed,” he said, to have to
request anonymity. “The PMO spends more energy trying to control
people than accomplishing goals,” he said. “Here’s how things work:
questions come to us, people want us to explain the mission. We call
the PMO to ask approval. They tell us to put it in writing, in an
email. We send it in, and wait. Usually the approval never comes.” He
went on: “We have to constantly fight the system. But if you’re not
going to let people do their jobs, what’s the point? We’re being handcuffed.”

A more senior figure at an Ottawa-based agency states: “This prime
minister’s approach, and that of his staff, is a considerable
impediment to the public’s ability to comprehend what the government
is doing. It’s really a different
way of doing business than anything we’ve experienced before. “The PM
and his advisers treat every issue as if it’s his own, as if it’s
personal. It’s just very strange, and it results in a management style
that blocks every door, including the ones that might actually take
the government forward.”
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Arthur Kent’s film reports and articles are available online at
www.skyreporter.com.
He has reported regularly from Afghanistan since 1980 for networks
including the CBC, NBC News, BBC News, PBS and the History Channel, as
well as for the Calgary Herald , Britain’s The Observer and Maclean’s .