Reports Link Karzai’s Brother to Afghanistan Heroin Trade

Source: New York Times

Reports Link Karzai’s Brother to Afghanistan Heroin Trade

October 5, 2008
By JAMES RISEN
The New York Times

WASHINGTON — When Afghan security forces found an enormous cache of heroin hidden beneath concrete blocks in a tractor-trailer outside Kandahar in 2004, the local Afghan commander quickly impounded the truck and notified his boss.

Before long, the commander, Habibullah Jan, received a telephone call from Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of President Hamid Karzai, asking him to release the vehicle and the drugs, Mr. Jan later told American investigators, according to notes from the debriefing obtained by The New York Times. He said he complied after getting a phone call from an aide to President Karzai directing him to release the truck.

Two years later, American and Afghan counternarcotics forces stopped another truck, this time near Kabul, finding more than 110 pounds of heroin. Soon after the seizure, United States investigators told other American officials that they had discovered links between the drug shipment and a bodyguard believed to be an intermediary for Ahmed Wali Karzai, according to a participant in the briefing.

The assertions about the involvement of the president’s brother in the incidents were never investigated, according to American and Afghan officials, even though allegations that he has benefited from narcotics trafficking have circulated widely in Afghanistan.



Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/world/asia/05afghan.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

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Gee. Who'd a thought friends of the Bush administration would be involved in the drug trade?

Know your BFEE: Oliver North, Drug Dealer>

Snort

flyarm found this gem:



Cocaine pipeline financed rebels by Gary Webb

knr

The Rev. Moon loves his digs in Paraguay. Right next door to his action in Bolivia.



Paraguay? Why not!

KARZAI brother biggest Heroin dealer in Afghanistan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-w8Z059OJZ4

The related videos have more, some have been talking (screaming) about it for years.

Tom Turnipseed pegged the petroturds: Bush, Enron, UNOCAL and the Taliban.

Thank you for the head-up on the drugs part.

PS: A most hearty welcome to DU, Azooz! Let's get these Bush bastards -- including the winking Sarah and madman Johnny Mac.

I say this not because I think that doing heroin is a good idea (It's obviously not), but because:
1. Many Afghan people who own small farms can't support themselves on food crops alone, especially during drought years, and letting them grow poppies would stop them from running out of money, and
2. For a small-farm owner to transport enough food crops to be sold at a price he/she could live off of would require a truck or other large vehicle in a country without a good infrastructure, whereas transporting enough heroin to sell at a price that the farmer could live off of could be done on the back of a donkey, which is much more feasible on narrow dirt roads, and
3. Legalization would stop much of the bloodshed being done in the name of the "war on drugs". Yes, I do realize that even legal crops, such as fruits and vegetables, are often obtained by means that exploit people, and people who try to unionize are sometimes murdered by the corporations which exploit them. But the amount of violence involved in the tropical fruit trade- while still tragic- is much less than, for instance, the amount of violence involved in the cocaine trade.

So those are my reasons. I guess that makes me a crazy left-wing extremist for thinking that making heroin illegal isn't a good thing.