AFGHAN WARLORDS GET RICHER BY THE DAY

For the past year, sustained efforts by the U.S. and its NATO allies to weaken Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, have failed. Instead, he has proved more than a match for his opponents and is still ruling the roost in Kabul.
Attempts to discredit him before the recent presidential election, which he won when his opponent, Abdullah Abdullah pulled out, also came to nothing even though he and Abdullah engaged in heavy vote rigging. But, in Afghanistan vote rigging is as much a part of the fabric of Afghan life as drug trafficking, tribal warfare and the prominent roles of warlords in and out of government. In essence, the Afghan government is corrupt and lacks any authority.
Yet, the U.S. and its NATO allies appear to have been blinded by that reality or maybe they have just been pretending to be offended by it. When Washington portrayed Karzai as a leader surrounded by warlords, it conveniently ignored the fact that NATO members had their own favored warlords. Those warlords have been providing private security at military bases, as well as helping Special Forces run paid militias in place of the still poorly trained Afghan police and military. Therefore, it was a bit like the pot calling the kettle black when Washington’s latest effort to damage Karzai’s reputation turned out to be a leaked report to the New York Times that his brother, Wali, was not only a renowned drug kingpin but a CIA snitch on the Agency’s payroll for years.
Hamid Karzai did not take the attack on his brother lying down. He produced a counterpunch delivered by his Anti- Narcotics Minister, General Khodaidad, a man with a formidable international reputation for being a straight talker. The general accused NATO troops of being involved in drug trafficking, an accusation previously dismissed when it was made by Pakistan’s former intelligence chief, Hamil Gul. The general also claimed that contingents within the NATO forces of Canada, Britain and the U.S. were running their own drug operations by imposing taxes on opium cultivated and transported through areas they specifically controlled.
In allowing his Anti- Narcotics Minister to speak out in this way, Karzai was putting a shot across the bows of Washington and European leaders. He was letting them know he would not capitulate to their public attacks on his image. Instead, he would retaliate even if it meant exposing underlying flaws and double standards in NATO strategy. Had he wished, he could have highlighted how NATO continues to pay warlords and their militias tens of millions of dollars to provide security and fight the Taliban. General Stanley Mc Crystal, who has asked for an additional 40,000 U.S. troops, has claimed there is no alternative to the use of private militias and it is a strategy that will not be reversed any time soon.
A report published in September 2009 by New York University’s Center on International Cooperation named warlords, their friends and associates who were in the private security business and doing nicely out of it. The report revealed that in Uruzgan province alone a private army of 2,000 Afghans was financed by U.S. and Australian Special Forces to provide security at their bases and to engage in field operations. The private army owed its allegiance to Colonel Matiullah Khan, who had militia forces working with NATO in other regions of the country where he had relatives and allies. The NYU report claimed that two Australian reporters learned Khan was being paid $340,000 per month for getting two convoys from Kandahar to Tarin Kowt safely each month. Other reporters discovered that Canada was paying warlords to provide base security for its troops. Most investigative studies have confirmed that warlords throughout Afghanistan are big in the security business and, as a consequence, they are now competing for business with the national police and military, which the U.S. has spent billions training. The training has been so ineffective that only a fraction of the police force has been properly trained and the military has not shown itself capable of front line fighting. That suits warlords who are only too happy to provide an alternative source of fighters for NATO.
While there is no exact figure for the money paid to warlords, some estimates have put the amount at close to $600 million. Two of Hamid Karzai’s brothers are in the security business and so too is the son of Rahim Wardak, the country’s defense minister. Jake Sherman, co-author of the NYU report is a former U.N. political officer with a firm grasp of Afghan politics. He believes NATO is so wrapped up in its relations with warlords that if it stopped doing business with them tomorrow they could quickly become a potent threat to NATO.
The U.S. strategy of using Afghan warlords can be traced to the months prior to the 9/11 attacks and, in particular, the weeks before the October 2001invasion when small teams from the CIA and U.S. Special Forces arrived in Afghanistan laden down with tens of millions of dollars in cash to buy the allegiances and services of warlords like General Dostum, who is a close friend of Afghan president, Hamid Karzai. Flaws in that strategy were exposed two months later in the mountains of Tora Bora where the Al Qaeda leadership appeared trapped. Much to the consternation of U.S. Special Forces, Afghan militias hired to hunt down Al Qaeda allowed Bin Laden and his inner circle to escape from Tora Bora into Pakistan. It later transpired that the hired guns were not only taking money from the U.S. military but were also being paid by Al Qaeda. Some were even Bin Laden supporters. That lesson in the dangerous, often quixotic character of Afghan militias seems to have been ignored by Washington and its NATO allies.
According to the NYU report, one of the problems of using warlords is that it is like getting into bed with people who have violent, sleazy reputations and will do more harm than good in the long term. There is evidence that a sizeable chunk of reconstruction funds regularly finds its way into the unregulated private security industry and therefore into the coffers of warlords and their private armies. The NYU report cites the following example of what can happen when the hired help decides to bite the hand that feeds it.
“On June 29, 2004, 41 Afghan nationals employed by an armed support group – an unregistered militia force – run by U.S. Special Forces out of Camp Gecko in Kandahar killed the chief of police of Kandahar and five other police officers. The incident occurred during a gun battle inside a government compound after the militia members sought the release of one of their members arrested earlier that day.”
It later transpired that after the provincial Attorney General had refused to release the militia member in question and had called in police support, the militia group sent 41 of its heavily armed men into a compound, which was U.S. protected. After a firefight in which six police officers were killed the militiamen drove out of the compound unhindered.
For those who recognize real dangers in the use of warlords and private armies, there is also a genuine belief that a separate NATO plan to arm local militias and pay them to fight the Taliban raises the specter that such newly armed groups will eventually come under the control of warlords and could be encouraged at some point to turn their guns on NATO troops.