Afghan Killing and a Karzai family feud

I don't usually report stuff such as this. What is significant is the degree to which there is voluntary silence about all this in most of the press. It would seem that the Afghan government is in coverup mode as well. What is of more general interest in the article are the details about family members being involved in lucrative government contracts Hashmat Karzai being a good example. The article is from the NewYorkTimes.



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December 20, 2009
Afghan Killing Bares a Karzai Family Feud
By JAMES RISEN
WASHINGTON — On Oct. 16, four sport utility vehicles barreled into Karz, Afghanistan, the hometown of the country’s president, Hamid Karzai, and pulled up to the home of one of his cousins, Yar Mohammad Karzai.

Teams of armed guards blocked the street and herded passers-by into a nearby mosque while seizing their cellphones, then removed the front door of the house, according to Karzai family members and several people from the mosque. A man in traditional white Afghan robes, accompanied by two security guards, walked inside and found two of Yar Mohammad Karzai’s children, 18-year-old Waheed and his 12-year-old sister, Sona, doing their schoolwork in their bedroom.

The girl later said that she remembered the robed man raising a pistol and shooting Waheed three times as she shouted: “Don’t kill my brother! Don’t kill my brother!”

As the intruders fled, firing their weapons, a cousin, Zalal Karzai, 25, came running from elsewhere in the house and saw Waheed stagger from the bedroom. “What happened to you?” Zalal Karzai recalled asking.

“ ‘Hashmat shot me!’ ” he said the youth screamed back.

Waheed Karzai, who relatives say provided the same account to other family members before dying two days later at an American military hospital in Kandahar, was referring to Hashmat Karzai, 40, a first cousin of the president and the owner of a private security company that has close ties to the Afghan government and millions of dollars in contracts with the United States military.

The murder in Karz, the identity of the man accused of being the killer and the fact that the episode involves Afghanistan’s most prominent family make for a dramatic — and divisive — tale, one that has not been previously reported. The killing has set off a bitter split within the family in Afghanistan and the United States, with charges, countercharges and claims of a cover-up by Afghan officials.

Some relatives said they believed that the death was vengeance for an “honor killing” of Hashmat Karzai’s father nearly 30 years ago by Yar Mohammad Karzai. For his part, Hashmat Karzai denies any role in Waheed’s death, instead saying that the boy was shot by drug dealers intending to harm someone else.

“They mixed up the houses and killed the boy by mistake,” Hashmat Karzai said in a telephone interview from Dubai, where he is staying with his family. “I had nothing to do with it.”

There has been no investigation of the shooting by the Afghan government nor any mention of it in the press. The F.B.I. questioned Hashmat Karzai a month ago, he acknowledged, but it is not clear whether American investigators are pursuing the matter. An F.B.I. spokesman declined to comment.

While some family members accuse the Karzai government of stonewalling, they do not claim that the president played an active role in blocking an investigation. Instead, they blame several of his brothers, including Ahmed Wali Karzai, the political boss of Kandahar and southern Afghanistan, for trying to hush up relatives and forestall an official inquiry, perhaps with the president’s knowledge.

“Not a single soul has come to investigate,” Yar Mohammad Karzai, 62, said in a recent telephone interview. “I told one local official, what do you want me to do, knock on Obama’s door?”

Noor Karzai, 40, a cousin who lives in Maryland, expressed similar disappointment. “They are protecting Hashmat,” he said. “He is sitting in Kabul getting money from the U.S. government. No one will touch him. We are sending billions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer money to Afghanistan, and this is how the government operates.”

A spokesman for the Afghan president said that the case was a criminal matter and denied that the president sought to interfere. Reached by telephone on Saturday, Ahmed Wali Karzai declined to comment on the matter, as did officials at the United States Embassy in Kabul.

Frustrated by the seeming inaction on the killing, nearly a dozen family members agreed to be interviewed for this article. Some, including Yar Mohammad Karzai, Sona Karzai and Zalal Karzai, who witnessed aspects of the shooting or its immediate aftermath, also provided documents about the killing. They include a complaint that Yar Mohammad Karzai filed with the Dand district police in Kandahar Province naming Hashmat Karzai as Waheed’s assailant, the boy’s hospital records and a death certificate stating that he died of gunshot wounds.

Other family members, saying they feared retribution, agreed to speak only on the condition of anonymity, as did three witnesses from the Karz mosque. All three said they heard the shooting across the street; one identified Hashmat Karzai as the robed man he saw exiting the house.

The death of Waheed Karzai came after the Afghan election in August, in which President Karzai’s government was widely accused of electoral fraud and attacked for corruption.

The activities of the president’s family have fed some of the criticism. Afghan and American officials, for example, have said that Ahmed Wali Karzai has been involved in or benefited from drug trafficking, while another brother, Mahmoud, has been accused of exploiting his family name to get lucrative business deals. Some relatives said they believed that news of the fatal Karzai family feud would have been an embarrassment for the president.

According to family members, the roots of the dispute go back to when Yar Mohammad Karzai was about 5, and his father arranged a marriage between him and another Karzai cousin. But when the girl grew up, she left Karz, became a teacher, married another man and eventually settled in the United States.

Relatives say Yar Mohammad Karzai was angered by the woman’s rejection and her family’s failure to make amends by offering a formal divorce or an apology. To punish her family, relatives said, Yar Mohammad Karzai fatally shot Khalil Lula Karzai, the girl’s brother, in 1982 or 1983 in Quetta, Pakistan, where both men were then living.

In an interview, Yar Mohammad Karzai declined to say whether he had killed Khalil Karzai, who was Hashmat’s father. He was never charged in the death, though he said he was briefly arrested in 1997 or 1998 when Hashmat Karzai pressed the Taliban government to detain him. Because the crime occurred in Pakistan, however, the Taliban soon released him. Both men went to Quetta, where family members pressed Hashmat to drop the matter and mediated a peace deal between the men.

But, Yar Mohammad Karzai said, he knew it was not over.

“I never felt comfortable with the closing of this story,” he said. “And neither did Hashmat.”

Hashmat Karzai disputes that. “The father killed my father, we captured him more than 10 years ago and brought him to Pakistan, and we chose to have forgiveness,” he said. “In Islam, I have the right to kill him, but I chose not to do so.”

After Khalil Karzai’s murder, his family moved to the United States and settled in Maryland. Hashmat, the oldest son, became an American citizen, and until 2007 worked at a Toyota dealership in Virginia.

He returned to Afghanistan, where his younger brother, Hekmat, 36, runs the Center for Conflict and Peace Studies, a Kabul-based research organization that supports the Karzai government. Before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Hekmat was a student and worked in restaurants in the Washington area.

After the American invasion of Afghanistan, he served as a political officer at the Afghan Embassy in Washington. In 2006, he moved back to Kabul to start his research group. He said he briefed American military officials on his research. Several family members described him as an informal adviser to President Karzai and said they believed that his influence helped his brother’s rise in Kabul.

Soon after arriving in Kabul, Hashmat Karzai took over the Asia Security Group, a company that now employs 500 to 600 guards, he said. In recent months, Asia Security has been awarded $16.2 million in five contracts with the United States military to provide security for five American bases in Afghanistan, according to Col. Wayne M. Shanks, an American military spokesman.

According to its Web site, Asia Security also has other major American customers in Afghanistan, including DynCorp International, a Virginia-based firm with large contracts with the American government in Afghanistan. Hekmat’s Karzai’s research center is also an Asia Security client, the Web site said.

This year, Hashmat Karzai began building a large house in Karz, near Yar Mohammad Karzai’s home. Some relatives say they believe that Waheed Karzai was singled out as a way to inflict deep pain on his father.

“If he had killed Yar Mohammad Karzai, it would have been wrong, but we would have understood,” said Mohammad Karzai, a cousin from Maryland. “The family would have been silent about it. But instead, he killed an 18-year-old boy who had nothing to do with this feud.”

Hashmat Karzai agrees that Waheed was an innocent victim, but he attributed his death to drug dealers. He said that Yar Mohammad Karzai and his brothers were involved in the drug trade — an allegation that Yar Mohammad rejects — and that one brother cheated some dealers. Intending to kill that man’s son, they mistakenly shot Waheed, Hashmat Karzai said.

He said he told President Karzai and Ahmed Wali Karzai that he played no part in the crime. He added: “Why would I do a killing there, right where I am building a house? That would be stupidity.”

The village of Karz is in Kandahar Province, about three miles outside the city of Kandahar, where Ahmed Wali Karzai, one of the president’s brothers, wields enormous political power. But after Waheed’s killing, government officials in the Kandahar area were strangely unhelpful, according to Yar Mohammad Karzai and other family members.

Immediately after the shooting, Yar Mohammad Karzai said, he called the nearest police station. But no one answered the phone, he recalled. He soon realized that the convoy had come to the shooting scene and gone without having to stop at a police checkpoint on the road into Karz.

Frantic to get help, Zalal Karzai said he called a friend working for President Karzai in Kabul, who gave him a private number for Ahmed Wali Karzai in Kandahar. Reaching someone in that office, he reported the killing. Later that night, some police officials went to the scene of the shooting, collected some shell casings and left. Yar Mohammad Karzai said they had not returned since then.

Meanwhile, at least three of President Karzai’s brothers — Ahmed Wali, Mahmoud and Qayum — have been urging family members to allow relatives to deal with the killing privately without bringing in the police, said Noor and Mohammad Karzai, the brothers from Maryland.

“My mom talks to Qayum and Ahmed Wali every day,” said another family member in the United States. “They have both told her, ‘Why don’t you keep quiet and we will take care of it?’ ”

Yar Mohammad Karzai said that Ahmed Wali Karzai had come to his house to offer his condolences. “But he never mentioned what had happened or who did it,” he said. “Later, when a family member asked him about the killing, he said, ‘You know who did this, why do you need to hear it from me?’ ”

Some family members in the United States have become so Americanized that they are unwilling to abide by Afghan traditions and have gone to the United States authorities about the case. Mohammad Karzai said he contacted the F.B.I. Later, he said he got an angry call from Hashmat Karzai, who reported that an F.B.I. agent had interviewed him. Hekmat Karzai, who also said his brother did not kill Waheed, acknowledged that he was questioned by the F.B.I. as well.

The shooting has left the family badly shaken, especially Sona.

“I can’t sleep in my room anymore,” she said in a telephone interview from Karz. “I sleep with my parents now.”

U.S. envoy may challenge for Afghan presidency.

This is from the Telegraph. Note that the article claims that Khalilzad selected Karzai to be president in 2004.

"Mr Khalilzad is rumoured to have long had his eye on replacing President Karzai, the man he picked to become Afghanistan's first president in 2004."

Nothing like having an independent Afghanistan ruled by presidents from the U.S. or picked by American Envoys!




US envoy may challenge for Afghan presidency
By Thomas Coghlan
Last Updated: 1:41am BST 10/04/2008



The Afghan-born US Ambassador to the United Nations, Zalmay Khalilzad, has signalled that he will run for the presidency of Afghanistan in elections next year.

Mr Khalilzad is a senior figure in the Bush administration who served as ambassador to Kabul before becoming ambassador to Iraq and then the UN.

He holds US citizenship, is married to an American and is a former professor at Columbia University.

advertisementHe has fuelled speculation of a run by announcing on Afghan television: "I will resign from my official work in the next few months and start a private business."

Asked if he would stand for the presidency, he replied: "I have said earlier that I'm not a candidate for any position in Afghanistan, but I am at the service of the Afghan people."

Sources close to Mr Khalilzad within the Afghan establishment insist that he is considering a run for the presidency and has been putting out feelers to political factions within the country.

"He is under pressure to stand from within Afghanistan," said one source. "His comments are genuine in that he will come to Afghanistan and work in the private sector, but he will reassess towards the end of this year whether he has a chance to take the presidency."

Mr Khalilzad is rumoured to have long had his eye on replacing President Karzai, the man he picked to become Afghanistan's first president in 2004.

Mr Khalilzad's supporters are alleged to have sounded out Pashtun tribal chiefs in the south as well as figures within the Northern Alliance, which now calls itself the National Unity Front.

The popularity of President Karzai has waned as disquiet at government corruption and the resurgence of the Taliban has been felt across the country.

Mr Karzai has become increasingly critical of the international community in an apparent attempt to bolster support at home, most notably by attacking Britain and blocking Lord Ashdown, the British diplomat, for the position of UN envoy in Kabul.

The Afghan president let slip his own intention to stand for re-election this week.

Following his return from the Nato conference in Bucharest on Sunday, Mr Karzai said: "I want to complete the work that I started - if they vote for me."

Why Karzai is angry at the Brits!

This is from the Independent. This is the sort of thing that Karzai himself might have done as well. I guess he didn't approve of the Brits doing it on their own. The policy has a family resemblance to that of the US in Anbar in Iraq where Sunni insurgents were recruited to fight Al Qaeda.

Revealed: British plan to build training camp for Taliban fighters in Afghanistan

AP
The Afghan government says that Britain had a secret plan to train 2,000 Taliban fighters
By Jerome Starkey in KabulMonday, 4 February 2008
Britain planned to build a Taliban training camp for 2,000 fighters in southern Afghanistan, as part of a top-secret deal to make them swap sides, intelligence sources in Kabul have revealed. The plans were discovered on a memory stick seized by Afghan secret police in December.
The Afghan government claims they prove British agents were talking to the Taliban without permission from the Afghan President, Hamid Karzai, despite Gordon Brown's pledge that Britain will not negotiate. The Prime Minister told Parliament on 12 December: "Our objective is to defeat the insurgency by isolating and eliminating their leaders. We will not enter into any negotiations with these people."
The British insist President Karzai's office knew what was going on. But Mr Karzai has expelled two top diplomats amid accusations they were part of a plot to buy-off the insurgents.
The row was the first in a series of spectacular diplomatic spats which has seen Anglo-Afghan relations sink to a new low. Since December, President Karzai has blocked the appointment of Paddy Ashdown to the top UN job in Kabul and he has blamed British troops for losing control of Helmand.
It has also soured relations between Kabul and Washington, where State Department officials were instrumental in pushing Lord Ashdown for the UN role.
President Karzai's political mentor, Sibghatullah Mojaddedi, endorsed a death sentence for blasphemy on the student journalist Sayed Pervez Kambaksh last week, and two British contractors have been arrested in Kabul on, it is claimed, trumped up weapons charges. The developments are seen as a deliberate defiance of the British.
An Afghan government source said the training camp was part of a British plan to use bands of reconciled Taliban, called Community Defence Volunteers, to fight the remaining insurgents. "The camp would provide military training for 1,800 ordinary Taliban fighters and 200 low-level commanders," he said.
The computer memory stick at the centre of the row was impounded by officers from Afghanistan's KGB-trained National Directorate of Security after they moved against a party of international diplomats who were visiting Helmand.
A ministry insider said: "When they were arrested, the British said the Ministry of the Interior and the National Security Council knew about it, but no one knew anything. That's why the President was so angry."
Details of how much President Karzai was told remain murky. Some analysts believe Afghan officials were briefed about the plan, but that it later evolved.
The camp was due to be built outside Musa Qala, in Helmand. It was part of a package of reconstruction and development incentives designed to win trust and support in the aftermath of the British-led battle to retake the stronghold last year.
But the Afghans feared the British were training a militia with no loyalty to the central government. Intercepted Taliban communications suggested they thought the British were trying to help them, the Afghan official said.
The Western delegates, Michael Semple and Mervyn Patterson, were given 48 hours to leave the country. Their Afghan colleagues, including a former army general, were jailed. The expulsions coincided with a row within the Taliban's ranks which saw a senior commander, Mansoor Dadullah, sacked for talking to British spies. One official claimed the camp was planned for Mansoor and his men.
The computer stick contained a three-stage plan, called the European Union Peace Building Programme. The third stage covered military training.
Curiously, the European Union says the programme did not exist and there were no EU funds to run it.
Afghan government officials insist it was bankrolled by the British. UK diplomats, the UN, Western officials and senior Afghan officials have all confirmed the outline of the plan, which they agree is entirely British-led, but all refused to talk about it on the record. President Karzai's office claimed it was "a matter of national security".
The memory stick revealed that $125,000 (£64,000) had been spent on preparing the camp and a further $200,000 was earmarked to run it in 2008, an Afghan official said. The figures sparked allegations that British agents were paying the Taliban.
President Karzai's spokesman, Humayun Hamidzada, accused Mr Semple and Mr Patterson of being "involved in some activities that were not their jobs."
The camp would also have provided vocational training, including farming and irrigation techniques, to offer people a viable alternative to growing opium. But the Afghan government took issue with plans to provide military training, to turn the insurgents into a defence force.
Afghan government staff also claimed the "EU peace-builders" had handed over mobile phones, laptops and airtime credit to insurgents. They said the memory stick revealed plans to train the Taliban to use secure satellite phones, so they could communicate directly with UK officials.
Mr Patterson, a Briton, was the third-ranking UN diplomat when he was held. Mr Semple, an Irishman, was the acting head of the EU mission. Officially, the British embassy remains tight-lipped, fuelling speculation that the plan may have been part of a wider clandestine operation.
A spokesman repeated the line used since Christmas: "The EU and UN have responded to inquiries on this. We have nothing further to add."
But privately, the UN maintains it had no role in setting up the camp. Meanwhile, Mr Semple's EU boss, Francesc Vendrell, admitted he had very little idea what was going on.
Yet the British ambassador, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, cut short his Christmas holiday to meet President Karzai and "spell out the Foreign Office paper-trail" which diplomats claim proves his government had agreed. They met twice, but it was not enough to stop Mr Semple and Mr Patterson being forced to leave.
Gordon Brown has also said Britain would increase its support for "community defence initiatives, where local volunteers are recruited to defend homes and families modelled on traditional Afghan arbakai".
Background to the proposal
* December 11
British and Afghan troops take Musa Qala, a Taliban stronghold in Helmand, after President Hamid Karzai reveals that a senior Taliban commander swapped sides.
* December 23-24
The acting head of the EU mission, Michael Semple, and the third-ranking UN diplomat in Afghanistan, Mervyn Patterson, hold talks with local dignitaries and Taliban sympathisers in Helmand. Afghan secret police arrest their colleague, General Stanikzai, and seize a memory stick containing plans for training camps.
* December 25
Semple and Patterson are given 48 hours in which to leave Kabul.
* December 27
The two diplomats fly out of the Afghan capital, despite international appeals to let them stay.
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Report: NATO is not winning in Afghanistan.

NATO should never have gone into Afghanistan in the first place nor should there have ever been the misnamed Operation Enduring Freedom. Karzai's government is dependent upon the occupiers but he is nevertheless not a reliable puppet. In fact, he is trying to make deals himself with the Taliban even offering posts in his government. After all, someone who can live with former warlords and "reformed" Taliban in his present government will not care about the sensibilities of his Western handlers if it can save his own skin. The sooner that the US and allies come to their senses and the U.S. gives up its imperial designs wrapped up in flowery moral rhetoric the better. What they have produced is a government that produces most of the world's opium, condemns a journalist to death for distributing material on women's rights. It also condemned a Muslim convert to Christianity to death and kicked a female legislator out of the legislature because she criticised her fellow legislators. Even if NATO wins what you will have is a government that will be far from having any of the religious and human rights associated with western democracies. But face it that is not the point, the point is that the government goes along with US policy and interests for the most part. This is from the Washington Post.

NATO's Not Winning in Afghanistan, Report Says
By Ann Scott TysonWashington Post Staff Writer Thursday, January 31, 2008; Page A18
NATO forces in Afghanistan are in a "strategic stalemate," as Taliban insurgents expand their control of sparsely populated areas and as the central government fails to carry out vital reforms and reconstruction, according to an independent assessment released yesterday by NATO's former commander.
"Make no mistake, NATO is not winning in Afghanistan," said the report by the Atlantic Council of the United States, chaired by retired Gen. James L. Jones, who until the summer of 2006 served as the supreme allied commander of NATO.
"Afghanistan remains a failing state. It could become a failed state," warned the report, which called for "urgent action" to overhaul NATO strategy in coming weeks before an anticipated new offensive by Taliban insurgents in the spring.
The Atlantic Council report was one of two strongly worded assessments of the war in Afghanistan -- both led by Jones -- released at a Capitol Hill news conference yesterday. The second was by the Afghanistan Study Group, co-chaired by Jones and Thomas R. Pickering, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia and other nations.
Jones said several steps are needed to "regain the momentum that appears to have been lost" in Afghanistan: a comprehensive campaign plan that integrates security and reconstruction work; the appointment of a United Nations High Commissioner to coordinate international efforts; and a new regional approach to stabilizing Afghanistan that would include conferences with neighboring countries such as Pakistan and Iran.
Progress in Afghanistan "is under serious threat from resurgent violence, weakening international resolve, mounting regional challenges and a growing lack of confidence on the part of the Afghan people about the future direction of their country," said the report by the Afghanistan Study Group, created by the Center for the Study of the Presidency, which was also involved with the Iraq Study Group.
"The United States and the international community have tried to win the struggle in Afghanistan with too few military forces and insufficient economic aid," the report said. It highlighted the lack of a clear strategy needed to "fill the power vacuum outside Kabul and to counter the combined challenges of reconstituted Taliban and Al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan, a runaway opium economy, and the stark poverty faced by most Afghans."
The study group said the United States should "decouple" Iraq and Afghanistan to establish a clear distinction between the funding and programs underway in the countries, which, it said, face different problems. It also called on Washington to appoint a special envoy for Afghanistan.
Violence has risen 27 percent in Afghanistan in the past year, with a 39 percent increase in attacks in the nation's eastern portion -- where most U.S. troops operate -- and a 60 percent surge in the province of Helmand, where the Taliban resurgence has been strongest.
Suicide bombings rose to 140 in 2007, compared with five between 2001 and 2005, according to official figures. U.S. and other foreign troop losses -- as well as Afghan civilian casualties -- reached the highest level since the U.S.-led invasion overthrew the Taliban government in 2001.
Amid the rising violence, the Pentagon announced this month that it would deploy 3,200 Marines to Afghanistan to help counter the expected Taliban offensive.

Karzai demands fewer air strikes.

Karzai has been demanding this for ages but Bomber McNeil is deaf. He no doubt likes the policy. It is being used in Iraq now as well it seems. Civilian deaths of Iraqis and Afghanis are less significant than the US and allied casualties. Those who give any support of protection to the insurgents in either country will not be immune from punishment and death along with the insurgents. As both Karzai and Maliki have pointed out such a strategy is probably counter-productive in that it creates opposition not only to the occupation but to the governments propped up by the occupations.

Karzai demands fewer airstrikes in Afghanistan-media
Thu Oct 25, 2007 5:06pm EDT

NEW YORK, Oct 25 (Reuters) - Afghan President Hamid Karzai wants the U.S. military to limit airstrikes against insurgents because they are killing too many civilians, the Afghan leader says in a U.S. television interview.

Civilian casualties in Afghanistan fuel resentment of foreign forces and Karzai's Western-backed government. He has repeatedly asked U.S. and NATO troops to do everything they can to minimize civilian deaths.

"The Afghan people understand that mistakes are made. But five years on, six years on, definitely, very clearly, they cannot comprehend as to why there is still a need for air power," Karzai told CBS program "60 Minutes," in an interview to be broadcast on Sunday, according to a partial text released by the network.

Asked if he wanted less use of air power, Karzai said, "Absolutely. Oh, yes, in clear words and I want to repeat that, [there are] alternatives to the use of air force and I will speak for it again through your media."

More than 370 civilians have been killed this year in NATO operations against militants, according to estimates by aid workers and Afghan officials.

NATO disputes this figure but acknowledges some civilians have been killed, mostly when Taliban insurgents attack from civilian houses.

Karzai faces growing criticism over rampant corruption, insecurity, booming drug cultivation and a failure to raise living standards in the country. He has warned that more civilian casualties would destabilize his government and threaten the continued presence of foreign troops.







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