I don't see anything in this article that wasn't already known, being seriously investigated or strongly suspected with preliminary evidence. The only thing that has probably changed is the percentage breakdown of opium to foreign remittances; a figure that generally keeps changing from year to year.
The investigations in regards to the hawala system and the businesses and banks that support it is nothing new. It was initially promoted in the 80s to (among other things) facilitate funding for the Afghan war and then heavily researched and cracked down upon in the early 90s after it became a criminal free for all which even included the likes of AQ Khan and Dawood Ibrahim (who was one of the most prolific profiteers of this system, and probably still is).
There have been crackdowns from time to time which have even included some high profile names like the BCCI bank (and a rather colorful collaborator list with titles like Sheikh X and Sultan Y). Unfortunately the sheer market for these services in countries like Pakistan or Afghanistan that have deficient formal financial systems catering to its working class, and other countries like Iran and India which have prohibitive and restrictive financial laws rendering the riskly hawalas more viable an option, makes it impossible to eliminate the system altogether.
While this is undoubtedly the primary financial system supporting illicit trade and terrorism in the region, it is also the only mode of money transfer for millions of people who need it to survive. Obviously the ambiguous nature of the system makes it downright impossible to weed out the criminals from the helpless.
yap, just check the accounts & ASSETS of the brother of the afghan president , all over the EU & off course in USA, but wait plz ! CHECK THE ACCOUNTS & ASSETS OF USA ARMY COMMANDERS & THIER AFGHAN ASSISTANTS TOO?
with love, for dear S-2 , sir!
Karzai's brother threatened McClatchy writer reporting Afghan drug story
Posted on Sunday, May 10, 2009
By Tom Lasseter | McClatchy Newspapers
McClatchy | Homepage
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan The
ride to Kandahar airport was tense. The
Afghan president's brother had
just yelled a litany of
obscenities and said he was
about to beat me.
Ahmed Wali Karzai is
feared by many in
southern Afghanistan, and
being threatened by him, in
his home, isn't something to be taken
lightly
.
In a
place like Kandahar, I try to
take precautions
letting my beard grow and
wearing the traditional Afghan outfit of baggy pants and
a long tunic but at the
end of the day, there's
no protection when the
most powerful official in the
region orders you to leave.
So after a
quick consultation with locals, I decided to
do just that.
I was in my
third week of tracking down former Afghan officials and asking them about
drugs and corruption. Several had
mentioned Karzai, President Hamid Karzai's brother and the head of
Kandahar's provincial council.
After talking with
poppy farmers, a
drug dealer and
former officials in Kandahar, it was time to see
Ahmed Wali Karzai.
Sitting in
his home, Karzai said up front that
he had nothing to do with drugs. The political enemies of his brother, the president, were spreading rumors:
"I am just the victim of their politics, that's all," he said.
I
flipped from one page to the next of my notebook, and started
with specifics.
Dad Mohammed Khan, a
former national intelligence directorate chief of Helmand province, told me
that Karzai had sent an intermediary to force him to release a
Taliban commander who'd been arrested in a
major drug-trafficking area.
Khan was killed by a
roadside bomb after our
interview.
"He
died, so I
don't know if he told
you that," Karzai said, looking
unhappy with the question.
He added: "
He's dead, so let's
leave it there."
I moved on to a
second former security official from the region I had
jotted a long list of names who'd also made allegations
about Karzai.
Karzai said that the official
"is alive, I can find him and talk to him."
He called for one of his men to bring
a cell phone.
He
began to glare at me and
questioned whether I was really a
reporter.
"It seems like someone
sent you to write these things," he said,
scowling.
Karzai glared some more.
"You should
leave right now," he said.
I stuck my hand out to shake his; if I
learned anything from
three years of reporting in Iraq and then
trips to Afghanistan during the past couple
of years, it's that when things
turn bad, you
should cling to any remaining
shred of hospitality.
Karzai grabbed my hand and
used it to give me a bit of a push into the
next room. He
followed me, and his
voice rose until it was
a scream of
curse words and
threats.
I managed to
record just one full sentence:
"Get the (expletive) out before I kick your (expletive)."
I
won't describe the rest, because
it involves the Afghans I was
working with, none of
whom wants to risk revenge in
a country where feuds often
end in blood.
Once I was at the
airport, there were
still several hours until the
flight and I had only
fuzzy ideas of what to do if the
plane to Kabul were canceled, a
common occurrence.
I was with my
Afghan colleague, and neither of
us talked much. It's a
routine that we've
worked out, the
silence in which we collect
ourselves and let the fear
settle.
After several hours of delay there was
speculation about whether there
was no fuel, or a
government minister was running late the plane finally took off.
I looked out the window, and there was
Kandahar below. A few
minutes later, I looked again, and
it was gone, leaving only
the darkness of the Afghan night. The trip back to
Kabul was a quiet one.
West looked the other way as Afghan drug trade exploded
Posted on Sunday, May 10, 2009
McClatchy | Homepage
By Tom Lasseter | McClatchy Newspapers
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan Locals call them "poppy palaces," the three- or four-story marble homes with fake Roman columns perched behind razor wire and guard shacks in Afghanistan's capital.
Most are owned by Afghan officials or people connected to them, men who make a few hundred dollars a month as government employees but are driven around in small convoys of armored SUVs that cost tens of thousands of dollars.
Kabul's gleaming upmarket real estate seems a world away from war-torn southern Afghanistan, but many of the houses were built with profits harvested from opium poppy fields in the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar.
"When you see these buildings, that's not normal money . . . that's drug money," said Ghulam Haider Hamidi, the mayor of Kandahar's provincial capital since 2007. "The ministers and the governors are behind the drug dealers, and sometimes they are the drug dealers."
Last year, Helmand and Kandahar provinces accounted for about 75 percent of Afghanistan's poppy cultivation, and Helmand alone was the world's biggest supplier of opium.
Afghan and Western officials say that's because U.S. and NATO-led forces failed to take the drug problem seriously for more than six years after the U.S.-led invasion in 2001 ousted the Taliban regime.
"They (the Western military) didn't want anything to do with either interdiction or eradication," said Thomas Schweich, a former Bush administration ambassador for counter-narcotics and justice reform for Afghanistan. "We warned them over and over again: Look at Colombia."
Now Helmand and Kandahar have become the core of a narco-state within Afghanistan, effectively ruled by the resurgent Taliban. Drugs are the main economic engine there, and most politicians and police are said to be under the thumbs of dealers. "I haven't seen any good police during the last two years in Kandahar," Hamidi said.
In the west Helmand district of Nad Ali, thousands of acres of government land reportedly have been irrigated and cultivated including wells and farm boundaries dug by heavy machinery as poppy plantations. Police in the area fired on government eradication teams last year.
Asked what American and NATO forces have done to halt the flow of opium and heroin in the southern provinces, Afghanistan's minister for counter-narcotics, Col. Gen. Khodaidad, who like many Afghans uses only one name, had a quick answer: "Nothing."
The Afghan government hasn't done much, either. Schweich said that at the highest levels of government the issue wasn't always corruption, but political considerations.
For example, he said, U.S.-backed Afghan President Hamid Karzai was seen in 2007 as "trying to prevent serious law-enforcement efforts in Helmand and Kandahar to ensure that he did not lose the support of drug lords in the area whose support he wanted in the upcoming election." Schweich, though, added that Karzai has recently appeared to "adopt a more hands-off approach."
A spokesman for Karzai, Humayun Hamidzada, denied that the government was soft on drugs, and said it was waging "an active campaign against corruption and drug dealing."
Mirwais Yasini, a parliament member who headed Afghanistan's anti-narcotics directorate for about two years, agreed that politics is a factor is the government's lax enforcement. However, he said, there's another consideration: "It's also for their own benefit, because some government officials have large lands that produce opium."
Yasini didn't provide the names of those officials.
Abdul Jabar Sabit, a former Afghan attorney general, said that when many Afghans got government positions, "they see that it is their turn right now" to grab as much money as they could. Sabit was speaking from his recently built house in an expensive Kabul neighborhood.
"All the officials dealing with narcotics are corrupt," said Sabit, who said that he'd borrowed money from a construction company to build his home. "The police are there to make a deal (with drug traffickers); if the police cannot make a deal, then the prosecutor will or the judges after them."
Mohammed Ayub Salangi, a former Kandahar and Kabul police chief, said recently that he didnt think that drug money tainted many Afghan officials. Salangi, who said he was paid about $6,500 a year, was sitting in front of his house in Kabul with a Lexus SUV parked in the driveway and a small posse of gunmen out front. Rents in the neighborhood run up to $10,000 a month. Officials from provinces where Salangi worked in the past told McClatchy they werent aware of any accusations that hes corrupt. In fact, Salangi was waiting to hear whether hed be named the police chief of yet another province.
IGNORING THE PROBLEM?
Some Western and Afghan officials say that southern Afghanistan spun out of control because of a serious miscalculation by U.S. and British officials, who all but ignored the long rows of poppy and the opium trafficking that flows from them.
The results were grim.
After the Taliban banned poppy cultivation in July 2000, Afghanistan produced some 185 tons of opium in 2001. The next year, production was 3,400 tons, according to U.N. statistics, and by 2007 it was about 8,200 tons, making Afghanistan the source of roughly 93 percent of the world's opium and heroin. U.S. numbers differ from the U.N. statistics but reflect the same trend.
Production declined last year, but there are differences about how much. The State Department puts it at 5,500 tons; the U.N. says that while the area of cultivation fell by 19 percent, farmers still produced some 7,700 tons of opium because they had higher yields.
Most experts attribute the decrease in land usage to farmers diversifying because of rising prices for wheat and bumper crops in Afghanistan causing a slide in opium prices. Afghanistan, however, still supplied more than 90 percent of the world market last year.
As a lead donor nation to Afghanistan, Britain agreed in 2002 to head up counter-narcotics efforts, but it did little to crack down on drugs and largely avoided the eradication of poppy crops.
While NATO-led forces in Afghanistan provided training for Afghan anti-narcotics units, they would "not take part in the eradication of opium poppy or in pre-planned and direct military action against the drugs trade," Jack Straw, Britain's foreign secretary from 2001 to 2006, wrote in a 2006 letter to Parliament.
The British worried that strong-arming poppy farmers could create more militants, and they preferred to wait for the rule of law to be strengthened, at which point the thinking went the Afghans could take care of their drug problem themselves.
"We think that this was a rather simplistic view of the issue, because as we have seen in Colombia, as we have seen in the Golden Triangle" an opium and heroin production area in southeast Asia "at the end of the day it is very hard to make a distinction between the drug cultivation and the insurgency," said Jean-Luc Lemahieu, representative for the United Nations office on drugs and crime in Afghanistan.
The softer British approach often didn't achieve much.
During 2003, for example, the British and Afghan governments tried to buy up the poppy crop in Helmand. The $40 million effort "failed to produce lasting results," according to a subsequent report by the U.S. State and Defense departments' inspectors general.
In 2006, the British deployed about 3,300 troops to Helmand and brought with them the same laissez-faire approach to counter-narcotics.
A report published that year from the British House of Commons quoted a British Defense Ministry official as saying that "the military contribution to counter-narcotics might be quite small . . . it will be in support of the Afghan authorities rather than the British carrying out a counter-narcotics mission on its own account."
In 2007, Helmand radio stations carried announcements telling Afghans that NATO-led and Afghan troops "do not destroy poppy fields" because "they know that many people of Afghanistan have no choice but to grow poppy," an advertisement written by British officers, according to British news reports.
Three former Helmand governors said the British forces' reluctance to deal with drugs was disastrous.
"When they're not targeting the source that fuels the terrorism it is difficult to defeat terrorism," said Mohammed Daoud, the governor from late 2005 through 2006. "Unless the international community includes poppy eradication and fighting drugs in their list of ways to fight terrorism, they will not succeed in this fight because it (the drug trade) is the fuel in the machine of terrorism."
Asadullah Wafa, the Helmand governor from 2007 to 2008, said that many Afghans took the lack of action as a signal that it was open season for poppy cultivation.
Cultivation in Helmand nearly quadrupled from 2005 to 2008, and now accounts for some 66 percent of Afghanistan's output. In 2003, the province had roughly 37,980 acres of poppy. Last year, there were some 255,970 acres of poppy there, according to U.N. numbers.
"It was not just the British, it was also ISAF (the NATO-led forces) and the U.S. military" that did little about the opium trade, said a Western official working with counter-narcotics efforts in Afghanistan, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.
The British and U.S. embassies in Kabul declined to comment.
Some experts on counter-narcotics contend that in the middle of a war, in a country with a weak central government and a tattered economy, the British had limited options.
"Peace first, drugs next," said Ekaterina Stepanova, a senior analyst at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute who's studied drug economies in conflict zones. "If you want counter-narcotics policy to succeed, you first need a functional and domestically accepted state."
Stepanova agreed with the British decision to sidestep eradication.
"The most counterproductive thing you can do is to start an eradication campaign, because it pushes the peasants further to support the Taliban," she said in a phone interview.
The issue was left mainly to underequipped and often-corrupt Afghan police, who had little inclination to take on the hordes of militants and warlords who were protecting poppy fields.
The police are infamous for being on the payrolls of drug dealers big and small.
"When the police arrested me I would give them 1,000 or 2,000 afghanis" $20 or $40 "and they'd let me go," said Ahmadullah, a 20-year-old junkie and former two-bit heroin dealer from Kandahar who was interviewed at an abandoned building in Kabul that's become an opium and heroin den.
When he was asked when heroin started becoming a major problem in Kandahar, Ahmadullah, his hair matted with dirt and face drooping with the lazy gaze of a heroin addict, paused and asked: When did the Western armies and Hamid Karzai come? It was a few years after that, he said.
Christopher Langton, a retired British army colonel who's a senior analyst at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, pointed to the fragile state of the Afghan government, "which has little control over the country," as a major factor.
"Weak control allows cultivation," he said.
A SLOW CHANGE IN POLICY
The Western powers' hands-off counter-narcotics policy in Afghanistan has begun to change, however slowly. Much of President Barack Obama's surge of 17,000-plus troops to Afghanistan will target the south, a move that's sure to put pressure on the Taliban's drug-running operations. The State Department and other agencies are spearheading eradication campaigns and agricultural development projects across the country, a carrot-and-stick approach.
In Helmand, the Afghan government with U.S. and British backing has distributed wheat seed to some 30,000 farmers as part of a pilot program for crop substitution, and has begun to map out supply chains for fruits and vegetables to lucrative markets such as Dubai.
Afghan eradication teams now have regular backup from Western military units that serve as quick reaction forces. Former U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration officers are mentoring Afghan Interior Ministry narcotics officials, and a central drug court in Kabul is seen as relatively promising.
Last December, the British military led a contingent of at least 1,500 troops for an operation in and around Helmand's Nad Ali district home to thousands of acres of poppy to establish a foothold. Then in February, the British conducted one of the first high-profile military raids of a reputed Taliban drug base in Helmand, in its northeast district of Sangin. They found more than 2,700 pounds of opium and a lab for making heroin.
The number of poppy-free provinces reportedly climbed to 18 from 13 out of 34 last year, including the former number two producer of opium, and there are expectations that the number will increase this year.
However, as poppy cultivation has shifted almost exclusively to five of the country's southern provinces, Taliban areas such as Kandahar and Helmand have become even more volatile. In 2007, 19 Afghan police were killed during eradication efforts. In 2008, that number more than tripled to 72, according to the Western official involved with counter-narcotics.
Government eradication troops in the south now come under attack by platoon-sized Taliban teams broken into squads firing mortars, grenade launchers and machine guns.
Amid the new, fragile momentum in the battle against drugs, the Obama administration has sent some confusing signals.
The president's special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, recently lashed out at U.S. policy, saying that American efforts to date have been useless.
"We have gotten nothing out of it, nothing," Holbrooke said at a March conference in Brussels, Belgium. "It is the most wasteful and ineffective program I have seen in 40 years."
During a briefing for White House reporters the same month, Holbrooke acknowledged that the Obama team hadn't finalized its strategy for counter-narcotics in Afghanistan.
In Helmand, convoys of Land Cruisers still speed across the desert loaded with heroin and gunmen, and no one dares stop them, said Sher Mohammed Akhundzada, who was the governor there for about four years.
Sitting in his living room in Kabul, Akhundzada bemoaned the state of his home province. It's a place run by the Taliban and narco-traffickers, he said with a shake of the head.
Akhundzada didn't mention that during his time as governor he was caught storing some 9 tons of opium in the basement of his office. Instead of being prosecuted, he became a senator. Akhundzada now lives in a large house in Kabul
Reports Link Karzais Brother to Afghanistan Heroin Trade
By JAMES RISEN
Published: October 4, 2008
The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia
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 presidents 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.
Both President Karzai and Ahmed Wali Karzai, now the chief of the Kandahar Provincial Council, the governing body for the region that includes Afghanistans 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, the presidents brother said in a recent phone interview. I am a victim of vicious politics.
But the assertions about him have deeply worried top American officials in Kabul and in Washington. The United States 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, several senior Bush administration officials said. Their concerns have intensified as American troops have been deployed to the country in growing numbers.
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 Lt. Gen. David W. Barno, who was commander of coalition military forces in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005 and is now retired. That could be problematic strategically for the United States.
The White House says it believes that Ahmed Wali Karzai is involved in drug trafficking, and American officials have repeatedly warned President Karzai that his brother is a political liability, two senior Bush administration officials said in interviews last week.
Numerous reports link Ahmed Wali Karzai to the drug trade, according to current and former officials from the White House, the State Department and the United States Embassy in Afghanistan, who would speak only on the condition of anonymity. In meetings with President Karzai, including a 2006 session with the United States ambassador, the Central Intelligence Agencys station chief and their British counterparts, American officials have talked about 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.
We thought the concern expressed to Karzai might be enough to get him out of there, one official said. But President Karzai has resisted, demanding clear-cut evidence of wrongdoing, several officials said. We dont have the kind of hard, direct evidence that you could take to get a criminal indictment, a White House official said. That allows Karzai to say, wheres your proof?
Neither the Drug Enforcement Administration, which conducts counternarcotics efforts in Afghanistan, nor the fledgling Afghan anti-drug agency has pursued investigations into the accusations against the presidents brother.
Several American investigators said senior officials at the D.E.A. 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 D.E.A. resources in Kandahar and southern 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.
We invested considerable resources into building Afghan capability to conduct such investigations and consistently encouraged Karzai to take on the big fish and address widespread Afghan suspicions about the link between his brother and narcotics, said Meghan OSullivan, who was the coordinator for Afghanistan and Iraq at the National Security Council until last year.
It was not clear whether President Bush had been briefed on the matter.Humayun Hamidzada, press secretary for President Karzai, denied that the presidents brother was involved in drug trafficking or that the president had intervened to help him. People have made allegations without proof, Mr. Hamidzada said.
Spokesmen for the
Drug Enforcement Administration, the
State Department and the
Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment.
An Informants Tip
The concerns about Ahmed Wali Karzai have surfaced recently because of the imprisonment of an informant who tipped off American and Afghan investigators to the drug-filled truck outside Kabul in 2006.
The informant, Hajji Aman Kheri, was arrested a year later on charges of plotting to kill an Afghan vice president in 2002. The Afghan Supreme Court recently ordered him freed for lack of evidence, but he has not been released. Nearly 100 political leaders in his home region protested his continued incarceration last month.
Mr. Kheri, in a phone interview from jail in Kabul, said he had been an informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration and United States intelligence agencies, an assertion confirmed by American counternarcotics and intelligence officials. Several of those officials, frustrated that the Bush administration was not pressing for Mr. Kheris release, came forward to disclose his role in the drug seizure.
Ever since the American-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, critics have charged that the Bush administration has failed to take aggressive action against the Afghan narcotics trade, because of both opposition from the Karzai government and reluctance by the United States military to get bogged down by eradication and interdiction efforts that would antagonize local warlords and Afghan poppy farmers. Now, Afghanistan provides about 95 percent of the worlds supply of heroin.
Just as the Taliban have benefited from money produced by the drug trade, so have many officials in the Karzai government, according to American and Afghan officials. Thomas Schweich, a former senior State Department counternarcotics official, wrote in The New York Times Magazine in July that drug traffickers were buying off hundreds of police chiefs, judges and other officials. Narco-corruption went to the top of the Afghan government, he said.
Suspicions of Corruption
Of the suspicions about Ahmed Wali Karzai, Representative Mark Steven Kirk, an Illinois Republican who has focused on the Afghan drug problem in Congress, said, I would ask people in the Bush administration and the D.E.A. about him, and they would say, We think hes dirty.
In the two drug seizures in 2004 and 2006, millions of dollars worth of heroin was found. In April 2006, Mr. Jan, by then a member of the Afghan Parliament, met with American investigators at a D.E.A. safe house in Kabul and was asked to describe the events surrounding the 2004 drug discovery, according to notes from the debriefing session. He told the Americans that after impounding the truck, he received calls from Ahmed Wali Karzai and Shaida Mohammad, an aide to President Karzai, according to the notes.
Mr. Jan later became a political opponent of President Karzai, and in a 2007 speech in Parliament he accused Ahmed Wali Karzai of involvement in the drug trade. Mr. Jan was shot to death in July as he drove from a guesthouse to his main residence in Kandahar Province. The Taliban were suspected in the assassination.
Mr. Mohammad, in a recent interview in Washington, dismissed Mr. Jans account, saying that Mr. Jan had fabricated the story about being pressured to release the drug shipment in order to damage President Karzai.
But Khan Mohammad, the former Afghan commander in Kandahar who was Mr. Jans superior in 2004, said in a recent interview that Mr. Jan reported at the time that he had received a call from the Karzai aide ordering him to release the drug cache. Khan Mohammad recalled that Mr. Jan believed that the call had been instigated by Ahmed Wali Karzai, not the president.
This was a very heavy issue, Mr. Mohammad said.
He provided the same account in an October 2004 interview with The Christian Science Monitor. Mr. Mohammad said that after a subordinate captured a large shipment of heroin about two months earlier, the official received repeated telephone calls from Ahmed Wali Karzai. He was saying, This heroin belongs to me, you should release it, the newspaper quoted Mr. Mohammad as saying.
Languishing in Detention
In 2006, Mr. Kheri, the Afghan informant, tipped off American counternarcotics agents to another drug shipment. Mr. Kheri, who had proved so valuable to the United States that his family had been resettled in Virginia in 2004, briefly returned to Afghanistan in 2006.
The heroin in the truck that was seized was to be delivered to Ahmed Wali Karzais bodyguard in the village of Maidan Shahr, and then transported to Kandahar, one of the Afghans involved in the deal later told American investigators, according to notes of his debriefing. Several Afghans the drivers and the trucks owner were arrested by Afghan authorities, but no action was taken against Mr. Karzai or his bodyguard, who investigators believe serves as a middleman, the American officials said.
In 2007, Mr. Kheri visited Afghanistan again, once again serving as an American informant, the officials said. This time, however, he was arrested by the Karzai government and charged in the 2002 assassination of Hajji Abdul Qadir, an Afghan vice president, who had been a political rival of Mr. Kheris brother, Hajji Zaman, a former militia commander and a powerful figure in eastern Afghanistan.
Mr. Kheri, in the phone interview from Kabul, denied any involvement in the killing and said his arrest was politically motivated. He maintained that the presidents brother was involved in the heroin trade.
Its no secret about Wali Karzai and drugs, said Mr. Kheri, who speaks English. A lot of people in the Afghan government are involved in drug trafficking.
Mr. Kheris continued detention, despite the Afghan courts order to release him, has frustrated some of the American investigators who worked with him.
In recent months, they have met with officials at the State Department and the office of the Director of National Intelligence seeking to persuade the Bush administration to intervene with the Karzai government to release Mr. Kheri.
We have just left a really valuable informant sitting in jail to rot, one investigator said.
