Evidence that Afghan leaders are on CIA payroll

[Antid Oto]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Evidence that Afghan leaders are on CIA payroll
By James Cogan
30 August 2010

A series of leaks to the New York Times and the Washington Post over the past
week has revealed that members of the Afghan government headed by President
Hamid Karzai are paid agents and informers of the CIA.

The revelations began on August 25 when senior Times’ correspondents Dexter
Filkins and Mark Mazzetti reported that a close aide of Karzai who is accused of
corruption, Mohammed Zia Salehi, had been on the CIA payroll for “many years”.
The information was provided by anonymous sources “in Kabul and Washington,”
suggesting it came from high up within the US military or the Obama
administration itself.

Two days later, the Washington Post cited other US sources alleging that the
“CIA is making secret payments to multiple members of the Karzai
administration”. The Post stated: “The CIA has continued the payments despite
concerns that that it is backing corrupt officials and undermining efforts to
wean Afghans’ dependence on secret sources of income and graft”.

Mohammed Zia Salehi, who is the chief of administration of the Afghan National
Security Council, is at the centre of a controversy between Washington and
Karzai. In July, he was arrested by a US-created anti-corruption investigation
unit. Wiretaps allegedly documented him requesting a $US10,000 car for his son,
as his price for stopping an investigation into a money transfer company, New
Ansari.

President Karzai intervened, and within seven hours had the arrest overturned
and Salehi released. Karzai has also blocked attempts to arrest senior
executives of New Ansari.

Any investigation of the company is clearly opposed by a significant section of
the Afghan establishment linked to Karzai’s administration. New Ansari is
accused of transferring hundreds of millions of dollars in cash out of
Afghanistan each year on behalf of warlords, government officials and drug
traffickers. A United Arab Emirates custom official said $1 billion in cash had
arrived in that state last year alone.

The Times noted that “many Afghan officials maintain second homes” in Abu Dubai
“and live in splendorous wealth”. Since 2001, the amount of money that has been
plundered from the “international aid” sent to Afghanistan must run into the
tens of billions. Large amounts also appear to have been simply handed over by
the CIA in pay-offs and bribes.

On August 29, Karzai’s office denounced the allegations that the CIA has much of
his government on its payroll, as “groundless allegations” that could
“negatively impact the alliance against terrorism” and which “cast [a] slur on
the reputation of the Afghan responsible executives”.

There are, however, no reasons to doubt that the claims are true. The CIA’s
operations in Afghanistan date back to the late 1970s and 1980s, when it
financed and armed Islamist groups that were fighting the Soviet military
occupation of the country. Several years before the events of 9/11, CIA agents
were back in Afghanistan, bribing various warlords to support a US invasion.

In 2001, Mohammed Zia Salehi was a spokesman for one of the most powerful and
murderous of the anti-Taliban warlords, Abdul Rashid Dostum, who was openly
taking money from the US government. CIA operatives worked with his militia
during the invasion to crush Taliban forces in northern Afghanistan and took
part in the cold-blooded murder of thousands of Taliban prisoners.

Karzai was selected as president on the basis of his decades-long ties with US
intelligence agencies. The US official with whom Karzai maintains the closest
relations is the current CIA station chief, known only as “Spider”. The pair has
been working together since before the 2001 invasion. One obvious question is
the role that the CIA and the many Afghans on its payroll played in the blatant
rigging of the 2009 presidential election, which returned Karzai to power.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the CIA station chief’s prominence and
close relations with Karzai provoked opposition from the US embassy and the
State Department, but they were overruled earlier in the year by Obama.

A possible motive for the latest leaks is to prompt a refashioning of the Afghan
government, perhaps involving some high-profile trials of corrupt officials.
Popular hatred and contempt for Karzai’s administration is increasingly blamed
by the White House and the US military for the growing support for the
Taliban-led resistance movement and soaring US and NATO casualties. Seven more
American troops were killed over the weekend, pushing the 2010 American death
toll to 308, just nine less than all of 2009.

Indicating the concerns in US political and military circles, the Institute for
the Study of War stated in a recent report on the situation in the major
southern city of Kandahar “that the population views government institutions as
predatory and illegitimate, representing the interests of key power-brokers
rather than the populace”.

Kandahar is essentially ruled by Karzai’s half-brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, who
has been publicly accused of both presiding over a massive drug cartel and being
on the CIA payroll. Karzai’s older brother, Mahmoud, who holds American
citizenship, has become one of the richest men in the country, with Toyota
dealerships and government-allocated contracts in the cement industry.

Any changes in the personnel of the Afghan government on the grounds of
combating corruption, however, will not alter the puppet character of the
regime. The rampant payoffs, bribery and outright theft flow inexorably from a
colonialist foreign occupation that is hated and opposed by the majority of the
Afghan people.

The CIA revelations underscore the cynical nature of the American propaganda
used to justify the war since 2001. Venal individuals who take payments from a
foreign occupying power and plunder the country have been portrayed as the
representatives of a democratic future for Afghanistan. The Afghans who have
resisted the occupation and fought for the liberation of the country have been
labelled terrorists, killed in their tens of thousands and hunted down by
150,000 foreign troops.

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/aug2010/ciaa-a30.shtml

**********
Dit bericht is verzonden via de informele D66 discussielijst (D66 at nic.surfnet.nl).
Aanmelden: stuur een email naar LISTSERV at nic.surfnet.nl met in het tekstveld alleen: SUBSCRIBE D66 uwvoornaam uwachternaam
Afmelden: stuur een email naar LISTSERV at nic.surfnet.nl met in het tekstveld alleen: SIGNOFF D66
Het on-line archief is te vinden op: http://listserv.surfnet.nl/archives/d66.html
**********