Today's NYT scoop quotes current and former officials as saying that Ahmed Wali Karzai, the Afghan president's brother, has been on a CIA retainer for much of the past eight years.
That may explain something Senator John Kerry said at the Council on Foreign Relations on Monday, about his recent visit to Afghanistan and a chat he had there with President Hamid Karzai.
During our walk, we had a very direct conversation...In fact, he asked me about it, he raised the subject, quite interesting. And we talked about the perceptions of his brother.
Let me just say this in answer to this. I have requested from our intelligence sources and law enforcement folks the smoking gun, the evidence. Show me, what do we know? And I'll tell you right now, folks, nobody has, nobody has. Nobody has given me the sort of hard-and-fast here's what we heard him say, or here's what we caught him doing, or here's what he's involved in, etc, so this swirls around.
And you know, there are lots of different stories like that that swirl around. Now, I'm not going to go into all of the conversation I had with the president. I think there are things that Ahmed Wali Karzai has done that haven't been helpful. There are things he does that are very helpful for us. And we need to look hard at the balance of how we can best manage Kandahar and that particular region.
This is no doubt going to bring back to life the debate on how clean the CIA's hands should be in a dirty war. There was a general sense after 9/11 that it had become so cautious and squeaky clean that in the words of one CIA case officer, "Operations that include diarrhoea as a way of life don't happen."
There are now no doubt many, many CIA agents getting diarrhoea on a regular basis in far flung parts of the world, and doing business with lots of local warlords, all of whom could one day prove an embarrassment. The link to the Kandahar Strike Force, in particular, looks like a hostage to fortune.
