By DEXTER FILKINS, MARK MAZZETTI and JAMES RISEN
Published: October 27, 2009
KABUL, Afghanistan — Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/world/asia/28intel.html?_r=2&ref=world&pagewanted=allThe Brothers Karzai and the CIA - FP
In the end, it doesn't matter much who is cutting the checks for Ahmed Wali Karzai - be it the CIA, as the New York Times reported on its Web site Tuesday night, some other agency in the U.S. government, or no one at all, for that matter. Either way, Washington and this notorious brother of the Afghan president are bound to keep cooperating. And unfortunate as it is, there's little that either side could or would want to do about it.
Ahmed Wali Karzai, who controls the drug trade and much else in the bellwether province of Kandahar where he is president of the provincial council, is clearly his own man. Implying that he works for the CIA, would be like calling the late Rep. Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill a tool of the Democratic National Committee. That late House speaker lorded over his Cambridge-Somerville, Massachusetts fiefdom for 34 years, doing favors for those who needed them, and expecting the favors to be returned. The resemblance is indeed so striking that, without prompting last month, a former top NATO official in Afghanistan described Wali Karzai to me as "a Tip O'Neill, a ward heeler," to whom all outsiders paid tribute.
According to th..
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/10/28/the_brothers_karzai_and_the_cia
