Word: wali
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...claim that Ahmed Wali Karzai has been on the payroll of the CIA for the past eight years, as reported in the New York Times on Tuesday, won't come as a surprise to most Afghans, who have long considered his brother, Afghan President Hamid Karzai, to be an American puppet. The revamped allegations that Karzai frère is deeply involved in Afghanistan's annual $4 billion drug industry isn't much of a shocker either - on the streets of Kabul and Kandahar, the name Wali has long been synonymous with someone who can get away with a crime...
...basis around the globe in the name of increased American security. (If you think the U.S. is only talking to "good" guys to get information about al-Qaeda, think again - men with clean hands rarely truck with those without.) But if the Times' charges are true, the revelations that Wali Karzai is a major drug trafficker who has been protected not just by his brother, but also by CIA operatives establish a chain of causality between the efforts of U.S. intelligence to obtain information and influence and drug monies that pay for an insurgency that has taken 53 American lives...
...sure, as one of the most powerful men in Kandahar, Wali Karzai would be a valuable asset in a region that has plagued U.S. and international forces for the past eight years. Kandahar is the spiritual birthplace of the Taliban and is still a hotbed of militant activity. Karzai's influence over local tribes, augmented by his brother's place in the presidential palace and his access to security assets, development contracts and U.S. money, would be substantial. As President Barack Obama deliberates signing a new bill that would allow money to be allocated for insurgents who jump the fence...
...question begs to be asked: If Wali Karzai was in fact so valuable an asset over the past eight years that his drug-running was at best treated with a "Don't ask, don't tell" policy, why has Afghanistan's situation steadily deteriorated? The Taliban, dismissed by Vice President Dick Cheney in 2002 as "out of business, permanently," is back in force. Part of that strength comes from a drug trade that has skyrocketed from 185 metric tons of heroin produced in 2001 to more than 6,000 metric tons this year, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs...
...attackers had at some point been trained in South Waziristan, a tribal area along the Afghan border that has long been a training ground for insurgents, Major General Athar Abbas told reporters at military headquarters in Rawalpindi on Monday. A telephone intercept, "which was recorded between Taliban commander Wali-ur-Rehman talking with some other terrorist, revealed that this attack was planned in South Waziristan," he added. "Wali-ur-Rehman was asking for him to pray for the fedayeen attack...