The New York Time is reporting that Ahmed Wali Karzai the brother of the Afghan president and the main controller of the country’s booming illegal opium trade gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency for presumably a job well done.
Mr Karzai has been on the CIA payroll for much of the past eight years, according to credible and highly placed American officials.
The agency pays Mr. Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home.
Seasoned commentators including those at Rasta Livewire believe that the co-ordination of opium cultivation, harvesting, processing and transportation program on behalf of the CIA, are part of Mr. Karzai’s job for the Agency.
The financial ties and close working relationship between the CIA and Mr. Karzai, world notorious opium producer and smuggler have created deep divisions within the Obama administration. It has also exposed the rank hypocrisy of the United States’ drug war policy.
The optics is bad, the messages conveyed are immoral and this perception is bound to affect the increasingly beleaguered United States war effort and war strategy in Afghanistan.
It has finally become obvious to the entire planet that there is more than Al Qaeda involved in the reasons for the American war enterprise in Afghanistan.
Given the relationship between CIA and Mr. Wali Karzai, the world’s biggest producer and trader of heroin and opium, it seems that exploitation of the lucrative Drug Trade is the real reason keeping the American elites and their military forces in Afghanistan.
Rasta Livewire
Read More @ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/world/asia/28intel.html?_r=3