Brotherly Advice for Hamid Karzai
Accused of influence peddling himself, Mahmood Karzai counsels his younger brother on how to clean up Kabul's crooked government.
Amid reports of politicians involved with the drug trade, judges accepting bribes, and a military deeply enmeshed in Afghanistan's thriving black market, the government of President Hamid Karzai has been accused of rampant corruption—graft so widespread that it's undermining efforts to stabilize the war-torn country. President Obama said in February that Afghanistan's government had grown "detached" from its own people. And when Obama unveiled his new policy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, his special envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke, noted that corruption in Afghanistan was one of the most serious issues to resolve. So what can be done to bring dramatic change to the crooked government in Kabul? On Thursday, at a press conference in Washington, DC, one of Afghanistan's most prominent business leaders claimed that he had a solution for Karzai: The president ought to hire an economic team and tell it, "Advise me on this issue." This businessman is Karzai's eldest brother, Mahmood.
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Portraying himself to the handful of reporters who showed up as propriety incarnate, Karzai said, "I've been involved pro bono in Afghanistan for seven years." He then proceeded to devote much of the press conference to defending himself against what he described as a "politically motivated" attack by the New York Times, aimed at undermining his brother's reelection bid later this year. On March 5, Times reporter James Risen described Mahmood Karzai as "one of Afghanistan's most prosperous businessmen," who, after his brother's rise to power, parlayed his influence to amass a personal fortune. Karzai, visibly bristling at the accusation, used Thursday's event as his chance to set the record straight.
There's no question that Karzai's business interests have grown during his brother's term in office. At the time of the 9/11 attacks, he co-owned a chain of Afghan restaurants in San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, and Baltimore with three of his brothers. After the US invasion, he returned to his homeland to assist in the reconstruction and today, according to the Times, holds ownership stakes in several of Afghanistan's biggest concerns, including a cement company, a real estate development firm, a Toyota dealership, the Kabul Bank, and four coal mines. But far from growing rich, claims Karzai, he's now "$8.5 million in the hole with no income from any salary, capital gains, or dividends to date." (Even if he's not making money now, it seems likely that his investments in Afghanistan will pay off down the road.) Asked for proof, he offered to open his financial records to anyone who cares to look. "The idea that the Karzai family should open its books, I absolutely agree…anyone in politics, particularly in a Third World country like Afghanistan, should open their books to the public."
Karzai is not the only member of his family to have come under fire lately. Qayum Karzai, one of the six Karzai brothers and a partner in the family's restaurant business, used to hold a seat in Afghanistan's parliament and became known for his frequent absences. He resigned in October 2008, purportedly for health reasons, after the speaker of the parliament began publishing regular attendance reports. Meanwhile, brother Ahmed Wali Karzai, head of the Kandahar provincial council, stands accused by American officials of involvement in Afghanistan's booming drug trade. Hamid Karzai has yet to investigate the allegations.
Just as the Bush administration found a willing partner in his famous younger brother, so have capitalists found a reliable friend in Mahmood Karzai. A founder of the Afghan-American Chamber of Commerce, Karzai now heads the Afghan Investment Company, a private investors' consortium based in Kabul, and splits his time between Afghanistan's capital city and his home in Maryland. He's a friend and ally of influential Republicans like former vice presidential candidate Jack Kemp and former congressman Don Ritter of Pennsylvania, who was present at Thursday's press conference. Long an evangelist for free markets, Karzai looked the part of the jet-setting businessman in a neatly pressed gray, pin-stripe suit and a power tie and peppered his remarks with references to political philosophers like David Hume, John Stewart Mill, and Adam Smith. Echoing the ethos of his Republican friends, he called for lower taxes and touted the efficiency of private business. "The only players who will take the risks and go into a contested area and create jobs, and goods and services for the community, are members of the private sector," he said.
So why hasn't Afghanistan's president acted on his brother's recommendations? Lack of understanding, Karzai explained. The president "needs great help in the area of economics…I think the US and the West should provide him with advisers." Particularly in anti-corruption efforts, advisers could do much to turn things around. According to Karzai, the biggest obstacle to stability in Afghanistan is not so much political as economic. People need jobs. Afghanistan currently suffers from 40 percent unemployment. Standing in the way is a reconstruction program riddled with waste and inefficiency. Karzai blamed the US and its NATO allies. "Most of the funds allocated to donor projects are eaten up through paperwork by paper pushers," Karzai said. "Layers of subcontractors literally buy and sell contracts, skimming the pot, and in the end, only a small portion of the funds go to project implementation. The fact is, corruption is the DNA of the contract and grant economy."
Near the end of the press conference, Karzai was asked if he felt he'd been libeled by the New York Times in its suggestion that he, perhaps more than anyone, had benefited from his familial connections to the government in Kabul. Yes, he said, and he was considering filing suit against the newspaper. He went on to suggest that his views on Afghanistan's reconstruction had found a booster in the form of the Obama administration, which he said seems to recognize that "security in the border areas will also be dependent on employment opportunities to compete with gun toting." Asked if anyone from the White House had contacted him about the way forward, he replied, "No, but they should."
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The smirk
Afghanistan remains the world wide leading producer and exporter of heroin and opium products. Under the Taliban, they were fairly to be characterized as: Islamic-fundamentalist Heroin traffickers. This is not unprecedented as the PLO (in its early years—before the rise of its worldwide financial support) gained much of its revenue through drug smuggling (see: “The Secret War Against the Jews” by Luftis and Aarons). The Taliban government gained diplomatic recognition (almost exclusively) from our great friends the Pakistanis.
Karzai, like so many other Muslim heads of state has successfully played the USA for chumps. Look at his photo above. Look at so many of his other photos. He nearly always has that smirk. I call it the “Arafat” smirk. It’s the smirk of someone who has succeeded at playing both sides of the street.
Respectfully submitted~
Follow the money..........
I have wondered for a long time why the US is risking the lives of its youth (though this has never mattered in all the wars it is always involved in) and spending billions of taxpayer dollars (ditto), when there is so much needed in the US itself, to prop-up such a corrupt and repressive regime as in Afghanistan. Well, under Bush it was about enriching his, Cheney's and Rumsfeld's corporate war-profiteer friends like Haliburton, Blackwater, The Carlyle Group, Lockheed ad nauseum, but why continue now?
Afghanistan is ruled by a constitution based on a 7th century medieval religious ideology that allows for no religious freedom, in fact any Muslim who wants to renounce Islam or convert to another faith gets the death penalty by law, as do also people who have the misfortune of being born homosexual there. And most women still wear burkas or heavy outer covering for fear of attack in the streets by Muslim fanatics with sticks and acid if they don't. A "new" medieval law in Afghanistan legalizes a husband's rape of his wife (all of them) if she isn't in the mood every 4 days maximum, and a woman now cannot leave here tiny mud hut without her husbands permission or travel without a male overseer at her side, making women prisoners, slaves and brood mares to the men they probably didn't want to "marry" in the first place. If said husband decides to divorce her he, or his father, will automatically get the brood of children, no matter how awful they are or what a saintly mother she has been (which is pretty standard in Muslim countries according to the Koran).
So WHY are the US and, by its arm-twisting, a few other Western countries sacrificing the lives of their youth and wasting so much money to prop up a country that is so opposite to just about everything at least the more advanced western nations claim to believe in? This government is only slightly better than the ugly Taliban before them - which were supported by not only Pakistan but the US also (why also is it that the US meddling actions so often come back to bite it in the butt?)
Follow the money. Who stand to gain by this "war"? The people of the US or the west? No. The Afghanistan intellectuals, women, gays, Muslims yearning to be free of Islam? No. Haliburton, Carlyle Group, Blackwater, Lockheed, Boeing, Bechtel, and all the war-profiteering military-industrial-complex Eisenhower warned us about with their deep pockets for taxpayer money, just like in Iraq? YES!
Time to get out.
FreeThinker: I do not submit
FreeThinker:
I do not submit that you are wrong, only over-simplifying the situation.
The single most critical event in modern world history took place in 1907. In that year, the worldwide sales of automobiles went from 5,000 (in 1906) to 75,000.
The fate of the Turkish-Ottomans as well as the Jews was soon sealed. The oil had to be removed from the Sultan's control and parsed out among the British, French and Americans.
This process involved empowering Arabs (as sub-puppets) and the strategy employed was to utilize their religious tradition and structure to support oppressive and dictatorial regimes. Do you think Saudi royals are religious? Bahhh. They are out partying, screwing and drinking.
But to the fanatic extremists, this same religion offers them the chance to seize power. Its true that Afghanistan has no oil. Nor does Pakistan. But Pakistan has nuclear weapons and so Afghanistan has become the breeding ground for this so called “revolution”. First, the Taliban (with Al Qaeda) intended to abscond control of the Pakistani nukes and after, with those weapons, to topple the Arab Oil-o-garchs.
Bill Clinton had made a deal with the Taliban. They would stop producing heroine in return for US financial aid. But they did not stop producing. They only stopped exporting (temporally) and stock-piled the narcotics. When Bush-W took over, it is unclear if he was too daft to realize that the Afgan narcotics were being hoarded for later export. But he went back on the payment-plan anyway. This, in the view of the Troll counsel, was central to the attacks of 9-11. Al Qaeda was the enforcement arm of the Taliban. Gangland war, pure and simple.
While I agree its probably true that Bush-W’s friends got wealthy in this process. I think that gives him too much credit. The US Government (with the possible exception of Clinton) has been hallmarked by sheer stupidity (and Clinton replaced the rampant stupidity with chronic narcissism). Bush-W paid us back for the 8-year respite of ignorance with a nearly completely brain-damaged administration.
Respectfully submitted~
Money for corruption?
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tagged as:
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How's this Mahmood, instead of another layer of potential corrupter's in an "advisory board" to your brother - just tell him that if he doesn't clean out the bad guys in his own government and administration - including the warlords who are no longer supposed to be warlords (ie: Gullbiden Hektemar) - then the U.S. will shut off the money spigot!
Or do you you still want to blame the U.S and NATO allies for all the "skimming" so that we can still be chumped into giving even more money?! The day will come when this country will finally wake up ... and just like with Pakistan ... demand you either get tough with your own crooks and wipe out corruption and rich dope-lords or if you haven't got the guts, give us the authorization to do it for you.
Otherwise - guess what ... you'll be on your own!
Dik Deerwood
