Taliban kills Ahmed Wali Karzai, but the Americans will likely find another client

I thought of Georgia Straight contributor Alex Roslin this morning after I heard that the Taliban had killed Afghan president Hamid Karzai's half-brother.

Two months ago, Roslin wrote an article for the Straight drawing links between a local heroin epidemic and Ahmed Wali Karzai, the so-called King of Kandahar, where Canadian armed forces were risking their lives.

Here's some of what Roslin wrote about the man known as AWK, who was shot at his home:

He is also widely suspected of being linked to opium trafficking. An October 2009 U.S. diplomatic cable released by the whistle-blowing group WikiLeaks in November 2010 said AWK “is widely understood to be corrupt and a narcotics trafficker”.

Reports about Wali Karzai go back years. A 2006 Newsweek investigation quoted sources saying AWK was a “major figure” in the opium trade. One Afghan Interior Ministry official said he “leads the whole trafficking structure” in the country’s south.

(Wali Karzai has denied the claims of drug involvement, saying there’s no proof.)

He has also been accused of vote-rigging in the 2009 Afghan presidential election and engaging in widespread corruption.

And despite it all, U.S. and Canadian officials have entertained cozy ties with Wali Karzai. He has reportedly received payments from the CIA, the New York Times stated in 2009. He was also said to be renting a large compound outside Kandahar to the CIA and U.S. special forces. “He’s our landlord,” one U.S. official was quoted as telling the newspaper.

Wali Karzai has denied he’s on the CIA payroll, but he acknowledges passing intelligence to coalition forces. “I’m the only one who has the majority of intelligence in this region,” he told the Times last year. “I’m passing tons of information to them.”

That intel seems to have helped shield Wali Karzai from awkward questions about his alleged drug ties. “U.S. and Canadian diplomats have not pressed the matter, in part because Ahmed Wali Karzai has given valuable intelligence to the U.S. military, and he also routinely provides assistance to Canadian forces, according to several officials familiar with the issue,” the Washington Post reported in 2009.

Wali Karzai is far from being the only Karzai with seemingly dirty hands. Another U.S. diplomatic cable, from April 2009, also released by WikiLeaks last November, said that President Karzai has personally intervened in several drug cases. In one, he reportedly pardoned five Afghan policemen convicted of transporting 124 kilos of heroin.

Former U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt is credited with uttering the phrase: "He's a bastard, but he's our bastard." It has often applied to U.S. foreign policy ever since—especially when you think of how the American government supported such thugs as Ferdinand Marcos, the Shah of Iran, Anastasio Somoza, Augusto Pinochet, and Mobutu Sese Seko.

Wali Karzai may not have been running all of Afghanistan, but his friendly relations with high-ranking officials, despite his bad behaviour, fit into the broader pattern of U.S. foreign policy.

Given the extent of U.S. efforts to prop up the Karzai regime, don't be surprised if the Americans find another willing client to take his place in the Kandahar region.

Follow Charlie Smith on Twitter at twitter.com/csmithstraight.