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 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, Jan later told U.S. 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 the president directing him to release the truck.
Two years later, U.S. and Afghan counternarcotics forces stopped another truck, this time near Kabul, finding more than 110 pounds of heroin. Soon after the seizure, U.S. investigators told other U.S. officials that they had discovered links between the drug shipment and a bodyguard believed to be an intermediary for Karzai's brother, according to a participant in the briefing.
The assertions about the involvement of the president's brother in the incidents were never investigated, even though allegations that he has benefited from narcotics trafficking have circulated widely in Afghanistan, U.S. and Afghan officials said.
Both the president and his brother, now chief of the Kandahar Provincial Council, the governing body for the region that includes Afghanistan's second largest city, dismiss the allegations as politically motivated attacks by longtime foes.
“I am not a drug dealer; I never was, and I never will be,” Ahmed Wali Karzai said in a recent phone interview. “I am a victim of vicious politics.”
But the assertions about him have deeply worried top U.S. officials in Kabul and Washington. Those officials fear that perceptions that the Afghan president might be protecting his brother are damaging his credibility and undermining efforts by the United States to buttress his government, which has been under siege from rivals and a Taliban insurgency fueled by drug money.
“What appears to be a fairly common Afghan public perception of corruption inside their government is a tremendously corrosive element working against establishing long-term confidence in that government – a very serious matter,” said retired Army Lt. Gen. David Barno, commander of coalition military forces in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005.
The White House says it believes that Ahmed Wali Karzai is involved in drug trafficking, and U.S. officials have repeatedly warned the president that his brother is a political liability, two senior administration officials said.
Numerous reports link Karzai's brother to the drug trade, current and former officials from the White House, the State Department and the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan said on condition of anonymity. In meetings with Karzai, including a 2006 session with the U.S. ambassador, the CIA's station chief and their British counterparts, U.S. officials spoke of the allegations in hopes that the president might move his brother out of the country, said several people who took part in or were briefed on the talks.
Neither the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration nor the Afghan anti-drug agency has pursued investigations into the accusations against Karzai's brother.
Several U.S. investigators said senior officials at the DEA and the office of the Director of National Intelligence complained to them that the White House favored a hands-off approach toward Ahmed Wali Karzai because of the political delicacy of the matter. But White House officials dispute that, instead citing limited DEA resources in Afghanistan and the absence of political will in the Afghan government to go after major drug suspects as the reasons for the lack of an inquiry.
Humayun Hamidzada, press secretary for President Karzai, denied that the president's brother was involved in drug trafficking or that the president had intervened to help him.
