[News] Hamid Karzai's Brother Only Tip Of Iceberg

[Anti-Imperialist News]

<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/29/hamid-karzais-brother-onl_n_338573.html>Hamid 
Karzai's Brother Only Tip Of Iceberg Of US Dependence On Afghan Warlords

First Posted: 10-29-09 12:12 PM   |   Updated: 10-29-09 12:26 PM

By Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON, Oct 29 (IPS) - The revelation by the New York Times 
Wednesday that Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of Afghan President 
Hamid Karzai, has long been on the payroll of the U.S. Central 
Intelligence Agency is only the tip of a much bigger iceberg of heavy 
dependence by U.S. and NATO counterinsurgency forces on Afghan 
warlords for security, according to a recently published report and 
investigations by Australian and Canadian journalists.

U.S. and other NATO military contingents operating in the provinces 
of Afghanistan's predominantly Pashtun south and east have been 
hiring private militias controlled by Afghan warlords, according to 
these sources, to provide security for their forward operating bases 
and other bases and to guard convoys.

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal has acknowledged that U.S. and NATO ties 
with warlords have been a cause of popular Afghan alienation from 
foreign military forces. But the policy is not likely to be reversed 
anytime soon, because U.S. and NATO officials still have no 
alternative to the security services the warlords provide.

A report published by the Center on International Cooperation at New 
York University in September notes that U.S. and NATO contingents 
have frequently hired security providers that are covertly owned by 
warlords who have "ready-made" private militias which compete with 
state institutions for power.

The report cites examples of major warlords or their relatives or 
allies who have been contracted for security services in four provinces.

In Uruzgan province, both U.S. and Australian Special Forces have 
contracted with a private army commanded by Col. Matiullah Khan, 
called Kandak Amniante Uruzgan, with 2,000 armed men, to provide 
security services on which their bases there depend. That case was 
reported in detail in April 2008 by two reporters for The Australian, 
Mark Dodd and Jeremy Kelly.
Story continues below
[]


Col. Khan's security force protects NATO's International Security 
Assistance Force (ISAF) convoys on the main road from Kandahar to 
Tarin Kowt, where more than 1,000 Australian troops are based at Camp 
Holland, according to the The Australian in April 2008.

Col. Khan gets 340,000 dollars per month - nearly 4.1 million dollars 
annually - for getting two convoys from Kandahar to Tarin Kowt safely 
each month. Khan, now police chief in Uruzgan province, evidently got 
his private army from his uncle Jan Mohammad Khan, a commander who 
helped defeat the Taliban in Kandahar in 2001 and was then rewarded 
by President Karzai by being named governor of Uruzgan in 2002.

The Australian Defence Force claimed to The Australian that Col. Khan 
is paid by the Afghan Ministry of Interior to provide security on the 
main highways of Uruzgan province. The Australian military had 
previously refused to confirm or deny Australian payments to Col. Khan.

CanWest News Service's Mike Blanchfield and Andrew Mayeda reported in 
November 2007 that the Canadian military had hired a "General 
Gulalai" to provide security for an undisclosed forward operating 
base. Gulalai is a warlord in southern Afghanistan who drove the 
Taliban out of Kandahar in 2001.

The same reporters revealed that Col. Haji Toorjan, a local warlord 
allied with Kandahar governor and major warlord Gul Agha Sherzai, was 
hired to provide security for Camp Nathan Smith in Kandahar City, 
where Canada's provincial construction team is located.

Blanchfeld and Mayeda found that the Canadian military had given 29 
contracts worth 1.14 million dollars to a company identified as 
"Sherzai", suggesting strongly that the former governor of Kandahar, 
who had become governor of Nangarhar province, was the owner.

The Canadian military refused to confirm whether Gul Agha Sherzai is 
indeed the owner.

In Badakhshan province, Gen. Nazri Mahmed, a warlord who is said to 
"control a significant portion of the province's lucrative opium 
industry", has the contract to provide security for the German 
Provincial Reconstruction Team, according to the NYU report.

The report suggests that the U.S. and NATO contingents are spending 
hundreds of millions of dollars annually on contracts with Afghan 
security providers, most of which are local power brokers guilty of 
human rights abuses.

In addition to Ahmed Wali Karzai, it names Hashmat Karzai, another 
brother of President Karzai, and Hamid Wardak, the son of Defence 
Minister Rahim Wardak, as powerful figures who control private 
security firms that have gotten security contracts without 
registering with the government.

Two anonymous United Nations sources cited in the report estimate 
that 1,000 to 1,500 unregistered armed security groups have been 
"employed, trained, and armed by ISAF" and "Coalition Forces" for 
security services. As many as 120,000 armed individuals are estimated 
by the U.N. sources to belong to about 5,000 private militias in Afghanistan.

Most Afghan warlords are widely reviled, mainly because the private 
armies they continue to control carry out theft and violence against 
civilians without any accountability.

In his initial assessment last August, Gen. McChrystal referred to 
"public anger and alienation" toward ISAF, of which he is commander, 
as a result of the perception that ISAF is "complicit" in "widespread 
corruption and abuse of power".

That remark suggests that McChrystal, who had carried out the Special 
Forces' policy of relying on Afghan warlords for security in the 
past, was now expressing concern about its political consequences.

Jake Sherman, a co-author of the NYU report, was a United Nations 
political officer involved in the effort to disarm warlords from 2003 
to 2005. He is sceptical that U.S. policy ties with the warlords will be ended.

"I don't see how U.S. and other contingents could sustain forward 
operating bases without paying these guys," said Sherman in an 
interview with IPS.

Beyond their continuing dependence on the warlords for security 
services, Sherman sees another reason for keeping them on the 
payroll. If the U.S. and NATO military commanders tried to cut their 
ties with the private militias, Sherman said the warlords "would 
actually become a security threat".

Sherman recalled that during his period working for the United 
Nations in northern Afghanistan, local police were hired to guard a 
World Food Programme warehouse in Badakhshan. After a rocket attack 
on the warehouse, an investigation quickly turned up the fact that 
the police themselves had carried out the attack to pressure the U.N. 
to hire more guards.

The present U.S. and NATO dependence on warlord armies is rooted in 
the policy of the George W. Bush administration in the early years 
after the ouster of the Taliban regime in late 2001.

The Central Intelligence Agency put the commanders of the forces who 
had defeated the Taliban on the payroll and gave them weapons and 
communications equipment to help U.S. counterterrorism squads locate 
any al Qaeda remnants in Afghanistan.

The commanders used the U.S. support to consolidate their political 
control over different provinces or sub-provincial areas. Human 
Rights Watch observed in a June 2002 report on the new relationships 
forged between the United States and the warlords, "While the U.S. 
government does not view this policy as actively supporting local 
warlords, the distinction is often lost on Afghan civilians who see 
coalition forces openly interacting with the warlords."

Larry Goodson of the National War College, who participated in the 
2002 process called the Loya Jirga under which the first post-Taliban 
Afghan government was established, told IPS he had recommended from 
the beginning a "de-warlordisation" process, in which "we took nasty, 
sleazy characters and turn them into less nasty, sleazy bosses."

But the warlords were kept on the payroll, Goodson recalls, mainly 
because the troops controlled by the former commanders were seen as 
"force multipliers", in a situation where foreign troops were in short supply.

*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist 
specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition 
of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the 
Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.


Read more at: 
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