John Burns on Ahmed Wali Karzai and the C.I.A.

John Burns, the chief foreign correspondent for The New York Times, is answering questions about an article in Wednesday’s paper about Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Ahmed Wali Karzai, who is accused of having ties to the nation’s opium trade, has been on the C.I.A. payroll since 2001, according to the article.

By John F. Burns

For those charged with finding a path for America through the political and military minefield of Afghanistan, it has been a tough week –- and the Times’ front-page story of Oct. 28 on the C.I.A. links of Ahmed Wali Karzai, President Hamid Karzai’s brother and a man long linked to the country’s opium trade, has been only part of it. The burden of the momentous decisions on war strategy that will have to be made in the next few weeks was powerfully transmitted by President Obama’s visit in the early hours of Thursday to Dover Air Force Base in Maryland, and by the photographs of the president saluting at the cargo bay door of a C-17 cargo plane as a military honor party carried the flag-draped casket of Sgt. Dale R. Griffin of Terre Haute, Ind., to a waiting hearse.

The aircraft brought home the bodies of 15 servicemen and three Drug Enforcement Agency officials who were killed on operations in southwest Afghanistan within the 24-hour period from Tuesday to Wednesday -– a toll that contributed to making October, with at least 56 Americans killed, the war’s worst month yet, in terms of Americans lost. Casualties on that scale have brought the Afghan conflict, for the United States, ever closer to the terrible price paid in Iraq. And whatever political calculations there may have been in the White House in having the president at Dover to talk to the families of the fallen and join prayers over the caskets in the aircraft’s cargo bay –- and it was as graphic a demonstration as there could be of the weight of the decisions he has to make –- nobody who has seen any part of the mournful journey America’s fallen make on their way home from distant battlefields can doubt that it will have made a profound impression on the president. There is nothing to compare with that experience, in terms of appreciating the full cost of America’s wars, and it is surely right that Mr. Obama would want to take the full measure of the price American servicemen and women are being asked to pay as he weighs the country’s forward course in Afghanistan.

That, readers may think, is a long way from the topic we’ve posed on this blog this week, the Times’ article about the C.I.A. links of Ahmed Wali Karzai, who has spent much of the past eight years on the agency’s payroll, according to the reporting of Dexter Filkins, Mark Mazzetti and James Risen, and that at a time when he has been insistently accused of using his position as the most powerful government official in southern Afghanistan to profit from narcotics trafficking (an allegation he and his brother, the president, have just as insistently denied). But as the responses on this blog in the past 48 hours have shown, the nature of the allies America has made in Afghanistan, the brothers Karzai principal among them, factors crucially into the question of how much deeper, if at all, the United States should become vested in the Afghan conflict.

If there is one theme that emerges stronger than any other from readers’ comments, it is the belief — the fear — that America has made allies of men so deeply corrupted, and so far beyond hope of gaining the trust and support of their 30 million fellow citizens, that no new troop increases, and no new military strategy on the part of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, has any prospect of success as long as we are caught in this morbid embrace. “This would be comical if it were not so tragic,” writes Norman Markowitz, in one of many similar comments. “This is further evidence that we should be preparing to pull ourselves out of the ‘Afghan trap’ before it is too late.” Eric, in another contribution, expresses a similar view. “If we had to do it all over again, wouldn’t we be better off if we never invaded Afghanistan or Iraq?”

Implicit in Eric’s comment is the heart of the problem facing those now wrestling in Washington with the choices to be made on military and political strategy. Whatever differences of view there may be retrospectively about the decision President Bush made in 2001 to use military force to rid Afghanistan of the country’s Taliban rulers and their Al Qaeda allies (and there were few in either major party in the wake of 9/11 who dissented, at least then), the people now gathered around the table in the White House are faced with “facts on the ground,” after eight years of war, that impel them, I think many Americans would agree, to find solutions that do not simply involve a peremptory abandonment of the country to the chaos that would ensue if western military support were withdrawn. Almost certainly, that would lead, and rapidly, to a new takeover by the Taliban; and it would stretch credulity to believe Mullah Mohammed Omar’s assurances that the Taliban rulers would not again allow America’s Al Qaeda enemies to use the country as a sanctuary for new attacks on the West. For one thing, there is little reason to believe that the diehards associated with the Taliban leader in the Quetta Shura would stick by his promises; for another, there is scant prospect that they could enforce a policy that denied sanctuary to Al Qaeda, even if they chose.

For all that, few can believe that there can be any good outcome for America in Afghanistan unless ways are found to give the country a government, and leaders, with some prospect of rallying the kind of popular support President Karzai currently lacks. It is virtually certain that Mr. Karzai will be re-elected in next week’s run-off election, and just about as certain that the run-off will attract the same widespread allegations of ballot fraud as the first round in August. That will mean that the western allies will have to deal with Mr. Karzai for another four years, like it or not, barring unforeseen events, such as an enforced end to Mr. Karzai’s new tenure. Several of our readers posted comments that reach back to Vietnam for an example of another war in which America was wedded to a corrupt and incompetent president, but one element in that analogy that does not carry over is the way in which the dilemma was solved. A few weeks before President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, a C.I.A.-backed coup in Saigon , running to an extreme that the C.I.A. claimed not to have intended, ended with the then-president of South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, being assassinated with his brother in the rear of an armored personnel carrier outside the presidential palace. Options of that kind, thankfully, have long been off the table. More likely, the best that can be hoped — and recent Times reports from Washington indicate that the White House will make this a pillar of its new policy — is that Mr. Karzai will be held by the western allies, henceforth, to far stricter performance standards; and that part of that will entail ridding his government of the most egregious practitioners of corruption and incompetence. Ahmed Wali Karzai, surely, will be high on that list.

Another point that emerges from the comments that have flowed in on this subject is that America has a bleak record, going back to the Soviet invasion in 1979, of choosing dubious allies in Afghanistan. Norman Markowitz writes that the C.I.A, under President Reagan in the 1980’s, adopted in Afghanistan the approach it had followed for many years in other poor countries, funding “all kinds of military and political leaders who would do its bidding with no interest in what their policies meant to the people in those countries.” Wahed, an Afghan from Kandahar, says in another comment, again referring to the mujahideen allies backed by the C.I.A. during the years when it was funneling billions of dollars into the insurgent struggle to rid Afghanistan of its Soviet occupiers — backing the men who rose to power in Kabul after the collapse of the Najibullah government the Soviets left behind when they withdrew in 1989 — that “we allied ourselves with such notorious thugs that their atrocities and misrule helped Taliban to come to power in the first place.” Another contributor, David, writing as I guess from the United States, recalls attending a recent speech by a young Afghan woman named Zoya, in which she spoke of the U.S. military’s “preference for working with the warlords, whom she rightly identified as mass-murderers, torturers, and equal to the Taliban from the perspective of citizens like her.”

It is an indictment that carries a good measure of weight with anybody who has had personal experience of Afghanistan in the past 30 years. The story of the 1980s and 1990s is too well rehearsed to bear repeating, but you did not have to be communist fellow-traveler — and I was not, having reported for the Times from Moscow in the Brezhnev-Andropov-Chernenko years, the period of the Soviet military build-up in Afghanistan — to conclude that the mujahideen leaders we chose to arm and finance were in many ways as reprehensible as the puppet leaders installed in Kabul by the Kremlin, in some ways more so. The mujahideen leader who stood head and shoulders above the others, by his moral disposition as well as his military prowess, was the Tajik leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, “the Lion of the Panjshir,” who was largely overlooked by the C.I.A. and its Pakistani agent, the notorious Inter-Services Intelligence agency, which channelled most of the $10-bllion in aid that flowed to the insurgents. The most favored of the ISI’s clients was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a murderous thug who cut his political teeth in the pre-Soviet period, so many Afghans said, by throwing acid in the face of women on the Kabul university campus who left their heads uncovered. Later, in the early 1990s, Mr. Hekmatyar served briefly as prime minister in Kabul, before quitting the government and ordering his forces, using weapons originally supplied to them by the ISI, to reduce much of Kabul to rubble. At a news conference in Kabul one day, I asked him if the acid-throwing stories were true. He stopped me afterward as I headed for the door. “You want to know if I am a murderer,” he said, inviting me for a cup of green tea. I did, and recall with a chill, even now, how he sat across the table from me, jocular, as he assured me of his uncompromised civility. Now, he is back in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, an ally of the extremist Taliban, and still sowing terror. It would be instructive to learn from the Americans who thought him a worthy ally in the 1980s what they make of him now.

http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/30/john-burns-on-ahmed-wali-karzai-and-the-cia/?hp