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..the money inflow from drugs production just about matched all reconstruction aid flows in the year 2002. Such funds lubricate the numerous mafias openly operated in the Karzai bubble economy: the timber, housing, drugs, fur and NGO mafias...They populate the state and services sectors, earn high incomes which are spent on consumption of imports and local services catering only to this strata, e.g., beauty salons, hotels, foreign travel, gardeners and security personnel, weekend parties, golf clubs, Toyota Land Cruisers , the Excelnet Cafe - the Intercontinental Hotel's cyber-cafe9, bars and restaurants (like B's Place where a pizza costs $12, when the average daily wage in urban areas is $110). On Christmas Day 2001, Variety Magazine carrolled, "In Kabul, Hooray for Bollywood." An article in the Boston Globe, announces "Hotel Critical to Rebirth of Kabul."11 For whom, when rooms at the refurbished Kabul Hotel will cost $125/night single occupancy?
Thousands of well-heeled foreign "aid" workers and Afghan expats partake in raucous weekend parties, their Landcruisers parked in a smart Kabul street. Imported alcohol flows and Madonna echoes in the street outside.13 Peter Essen, German owner of the giant Supreme Food Service warehouse which initially supplied only the international ISAF force , caters to diplomats. Foreign aid workers, international journalists, etc.14 Essen said, "we've got beer, wine, whiskey, pork - anything you want." Reuters reported some locals in Kabul mentioning foreign women engaging in solicitation on street corners near foreign offices in downtown Kabul...
Brahimi scolded the hapless envoy for having gone too far in naming the Karzai regime officials, saying that such concerns are better kept private. In other word, no criticism of the Karzai regime however founded it might be, deserves public airing, the carefully constructed image of a sovereign and competent Karzai needs to be kept...In early September 2003, Karzai's chief of police in Kabul led officers in bulldozing away homes that some thirty poor Afghan families had built for themselves on open land in the posh Wazir Akbar Khan area, to make way for houses for high-ranking Karzai officials. Even the United Nations felt obliged to issue a mild protest against the new "housing mafia."...
the warlords so maligned in western press accounts, are in fact local military commanders and Karzai government officials...These unsavory elements also deal in drugs, extort, possess beautiful new mansions, and enjoy the support of both Karzai and the Americans. The Jalalabad narco-mafia goes back to the 1980s anti-Soviet struggle..What we "see" says a lot about who we are. The wealthy Pashtun, Hamid Karzai, leader of the Popolzai clan, "sees" traffic jams, whereas others "see" begging, an urban landscape of modern poverty, and a Hamid Karzai - "the chicquest man on the planet" - wearing his trademark karakul hat made from the downy fur of aborted sheep fetuses....
http://www.cursor.org/stories/afghaniscam.html |
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