Banksters, Afghan style

Der Spiegel in July: "Billions of dollars are being secreted out of Kabul to help well-connected Afghans buy luxury villas in Dubai."

The Dubai villas are usually registered in the name of those issuing the loans, such as Sherkhan Farnood, deposed chairman of Kabul Bank, who transferred hundreds of millions of dollars from Afghanistan to Dubai in 2009.

In July Farnood boasted :

"Kabul Bank is so flush that it is building a $30 million headquarters, a cluster of shimmering towers of bulletproof glass."

Since yesterday Kabul Bank is more like a clusterfuck of shimmering droves of Afghans making bank withdrawals and the only bulletproof part is the time-honoured bankster strategy of asking the US Treasury for a bailout. Farnood today :

"If we survive Saturday and Sunday, we will be okay," said Farnood, who spoke at his luxury waterfront villa in Dubai shortly after his return to the Persian Gulf emirate from Kabul.

Mahmoud Karzai, brother to President Karzai, third largest shareholder in Kabul Bank and ... wait for it ... proud owner of a Dubai villa :

"America should do something. If the Treasury Department will guarantee that everyone will get their money, maybe that will work," said the president's brother, who rushed to Kabul on Wednesday from Dubai, where he spends most of his time in a Palm Jumeirah villa purchased with Kabul Bank money. "

Quick financial status update on your investment as a shareholder in those Dubai villas :

Canada's aid in Afghanistan will amount to $1.9B over the ten-year period ending in 2011, making Canada one of Afghanistan's largest donors. In the 2008/2009 fiscal year, Canada disbursed approximately $224M but unfortunately the Dubai real estate market collapsed in 2008.

War is a racket villa in Dubai

Der Spiegel :
"Billions of dollars are being secreted out of Kabul to help well-connected Afghans buy luxury villas in Dubai. Amid concerns that the money could be the result of corruption, American politicians have temporarily cut off [$3.9-billion in] aid to the Afghan government."

Proud new owners of villas in Dubai:
"a brother and a cousin of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, one of Karzai's former vice presidents and the brother one of the country's two current vice presidents."

Properties are registered under the names of the individuals issuing the loans, such as Sherkhan Farnood, the founder and chairman of Kabul Bank, Afghanistan's largest private bank.
Farnood : "What I'm doing is not proper, not exactly what I should do. But this is Afghanistan."

Kabul Bank's executives helped finance President Hamid Karzai's reelection campaign last year, and the bank is partly owned by Mahmoud Karzai, the Afghan president's older brother, and by Haseen Fahim, the brother of Karzai's vice presidential running mate.
Karzai's brother has "an informal home-loan agreement with Kabul Bank and pays $7,000 a month in interest".

Khalilullah Fruzi, chief executive of the bank, says "Kabul Bank is so flush that it is building a $30 million headquarters, a cluster of shimmering towers of bulletproof glass."
The bank is also spending millions to hire gunmen from a company called Khurasan Security Services, which, according to registration documents, used to be controlled by Fruzi and is now run by his brother.

Meanwhile, a new survey finds that corruption in Afghanistan has doubled since 2007, with one in seven Afghans paying nearly $1 billion in bribes last year, and US contractors are leaving the country without paying Afghan construction companies hundreds of thousands, even millions, of dollars owed, but McCain says winning Kandahar is the key to winning the war.

And so it goes....



Canada's aid in Afghanistan will amount to $1.9B over the ten-year period ending in 2011, making Canada one of Afghanistan's largest donors. In the 2008/2009 fiscal year, Canada disbursed approximately $224M.
And I'll bet you never expected to be part owner of a villa in Dubai.

No problem Hamid.

Take care of your own problems.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has slammed Western backers for the second time in a week, accusing the United States of interference...

Here's an idea. Since, administratively, Afghanistan is presently little more than a quagmire of warlords, narco-agriculture and rampant government corruption why not just hand you the whole thing and see how it turns out.

Hell, that's virtually what the moronic Bush administration did for you when it found another distraction. Turned out well, didn't it?

How the US funds the Taliban

From Aram Roston at The Nation :

"Welcome to the wartime contracting bazaar in Afghanistan. It is a virtual carnival of improbable characters and shady connections, with former CIA officials and ex-military officers joining hands with former Taliban and mujahedeen to collect US government funds in the name of the war effort."

An example : NCL Holdings, a licensed security company in Afghanistan, has been awarded hundreds of millions of dollars - a 600% increase for the proposed new "surge" - to handle the bulk of US trucking in Afghanistan. Its chief principal is Hamed Warduk, the American son of Afghanistan's current defense minister, who graduated as valedictorian from Georgetown University in 1997, earned a Rhodes scholarship, and interned at the American Enterprise Institute, where "he forged alliances with some of the premier figures in American conservative foreign policy circles, such as the late Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick".

Watan Risk, another security company run by Karzai's family relatives - convicted heroin traffickers, controls the road to Kandahar because of its principal's alliance with a local warlord who really controls the route, extorting $1500 per truck for passage to Kandahar.
NCL pays Watan Risk $500,000 a month for protection.

Roston :

"The security firms don't really protect convoys of American military goods here, because they simply can't; they need the Taliban's cooperation.

"Most escorting is done by the Taliban," an Afghan private security official told me. "Now the government is so weak," he added, "everyone is paying the Taliban."

To underline the point: NCL, operating on a $360 million contract from the US military, and owned by the Afghan defense minister's son, is paying millions per year from those funds to a company owned by President Karzai's cousins, for protection."

Afghanistan - the "good war".
Would the Taliban collapse entirely if not financially supported by the US government?
Is all that is necessary for the collapse of the Taliban is for the troops to leave?

Malalai Joya has been telling us this for years.
She is speaking in Vancouver tonight at 7pm at St. Andrew's Wesley Church at Nelson Street and Burrard.
West End Bob will be there - naturally he'll be wearing a disguise.

Operation Enduring Pipeline

If asked, Canada would help the Afghan army defend a proposed $7.6-billion U.S.-backed natural gas pipeline running from Turkmenistan, through Afghanistan, to Pakistan and India.

We've heard about this pipeline before. U.S. Unocal and Bridas of Argentina were both bidding on it with the Taliban when the Taliban pulled out of the negotiations just one month before the U.S. invaded Afghanistan. Afghan President Karzai, who either was or wasn't previously a Unocal employee, signed an agreement with the Turkman president this April to begin construction of the pipeline in 2010. Named TAPI after the four nations involved, it will run straight through Kandahar where Canadian troops are slated to stay till at least 2011.

Energy economist John Foster has written a report for the Canadian Council of Policy Alternatives, questioning the motives of the countries involved and outlining three reasons why the US wants it :
1) To limit Russia's influence in the region. Turkmanistan currently exports nearly all its gas to Russia.
2) To isolate Iran and their proposed rival pipeline which would run from Iran to India and Pakistan.
3) To forge links with India that would isolate India from China, who have already begun their gas pipeline from Turkmenistan east through Kazakhstan to China.

Is this why Canada is in Afghanistan?

From a Council of Foreign Relations panel discussion in 2007, journalist Steve LeVine :
"US policy is pipeline-driven within a strategy… to make this area a pro-western swath of territory between Russia and Iran, driven by the establishment of an independent economic channel. Everything else is really – I hate to call it window-dressing – but it’s secondary to that."

G&M : "Liberal Senator Colin Kenny - chairman of the Senate's national security and defence committee - said Canada has similar interests in the global energy market as the United States, and should not shy away from supporting U.S. geopolitical objectives. "I don't think we would be serving Canadian interests if we were ignoring American interests," he said."

What ever happened to little girls going to school, bringing democracy to Afghanistan, standing up for NATO ...

John Foster says he wrote his report to foster debate about pipeline politics in the absence of any official statement from the Canadian government or discussion in the national media :

A PIPELINE THROUGH A TROUBLED LAND: AFGHANISTAN, CANADA, AND THE NEW GREAT ENERGY GAME

A very interesting read.

Cross-posted at Creekside

'I Wish I Had the Taliban as My Soldiers'

A refreshingly frank Spiegel interview with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, which bears little resemblance to the whitewashed crap we are used to getting from the Canadian media.

SPIEGEL: Some of your closest aides are suspected of stealing land, drug smuggling and having illegal militias, among them respected governors and police chiefs. Your attorney general, Abdul Jabar Sabet, just named a few of them, including the governor of Nangarhar. Why do you still protect these people?

Karzai: I am not protecting anybody. We are trying to govern Afghanistan and bring peace and stability. I know about the problems with the police. The international community finally agreed after two years of very intense and angry negotiations that the police are a problem and in the middle of 2007 they began to work with us. The checkpoints on the roads, for example, were developed during the years of the Soviet invasion, a time when the country became lawless and each local commander set up his own checkpoint to collect money.

SPIEGEL: During the Taliban times there were no checkpoints at all.

Karzai: That was the best aspect of the Taliban. They did a lot wrong, but they also did a few things right. I wish I had the Taliban as my soldiers. I wish they were serving me and not people in Pakistan or others. When we came back to Afghanistan, the international community brought back all those people who had turned away from the Taliban …

SPIEGEL: … you mean the brutal commanders who fought in the civil war …

Karzai: … who then became partners with the foreign allies and are still paid by them today for their support. It is not always easy for me to find a way that can enable Afghanistan's administration to function.

SPIEGEL: Dirty deals are still necessary for the stability of Afghanistan?

Karzai: Absolutely necessary, because we lack the power to solve these problems in other ways. What do you want? War? Let me give you an example. We wanted to arrest a really terrible warlord, but we couldn't do it because he is being protected by a particular country. We found out that he was being paid $30,000 a month to stay on his good side. They even used his soldiers as guards …

continued....

Cross-posted at Creekside

Also from Spiegel : "Why NATO troops can't deliver peace in Afghanistan" :
"Last year, 1,469 bombs exploded along Afghan roads, a number almost five times as high as in 2004. There were 8,950 armed attacks on troops and civilian support personnel, 10 times more than only three years earlier. One hundred and thirty suicide bombers blew themselves up in 2007. There were three suicide bombings in 2004."

Exactly what are we in Aghanistan for?

Notwithstanding that sometime in the near future I have something of a horror story to tell you about the attrition rate of troops returning to Canada , the question of Canada's strategic purpose for being in Afghanistan arises once again.

If we are having to explain to the governor of the province in which Canadian troops are providing a primary combat force that prisoners turned over to his custody are not to be beaten senseless with an electrical cable and rubber hoses, somewhere a lesson has been missed.

Now we have the story of a young Afghani journalism student facing a death sentence - for downloading and distributing information from the internet.

A young man, a student of journalism, is sentenced to death by an Islamic court for downloading a report from the internet. The sentence is then upheld by the country's rulers. This is Afghanistan – not in Taliban times but six years after "liberation" and under the democratic rule of the West's ally Hamid Karzai.

The fate of Sayed Pervez Kambaksh has led to domestic and international protests, and deepening concern about erosion of civil liberties in Afghanistan. He was accused of blasphemy after he downloaded a report from a Farsi website which stated that Muslim fundamentalists who claimed the Koran justified the oppression of women had misrepresented the views of the prophet Mohamed.

Mr Kambaksh, 23, distributed the tract to fellow students and teachers at Balkh University with the aim, he said, of provoking a debate on the matter. But a complaint was made against him and he was arrested, tried by religious judges without – say his friends and family – being allowed legal representation and sentenced to death.

And if you are taken to believe that this is the unsanctioned act of an independent religious court you would be wrong.

The Independent is launching a campaign today to secure justice for Mr Kambaksh. The UN, human rights groups, journalists' organisations and Western diplomats have urged Mr Karzai's government to intervene and free him. But the Afghan Senate passed a motion yesterday confirming the death sentence.

The MP who proposed the ruling condemning Mr Kambaksh was Sibghatullah Mojaddedi, a key ally of Mr Karzai. The Senate also attacked the international community for putting pressure on the Afghan government and urged Mr Karzai not to be influenced by outside un-Islamic views.

The case of Mr Kambaksh, who also worked a s reporter for the Jahan-i-Naw (New World) newspaper, is seen in Afghanistan as yet another chapter in the escalation in the confrontation between Afghanistan and the West.

It comes in the wake of Mr Karzai accusing the British of actually worsening the situation in Helmand province by their actions and his subsequent blocking of the appointment of Lord Ashdown as the UN envoy and expelling a British and an Irish diplomat.

This is the new crowd, same as the old crowd. If the non-Taliban is behaving the same as the Taliban did, what is it exactly we're supposed to accomplish?

Canada has a position of leverage here. Very simply Karzai needs to be told a few facts of life. If Karzai, as he has so often repeated, insists that Canadian troops remain in Kandahar then he needs to accept that the cost of our presence is acquiescence to demands for a much more just and civil system of government and law. Killing people for what they read doesn't pass muster.

If Karzai can't accept that then the solution is simple. We leave and Afghanistan can defend itself.
The Independent has put together a petition.

Sayed Pervez Kambaksh's imminent execution is an affront to civilised values. It is not, however, a foregone conclusion. If enough international pressure is brought to bear on President Karzai's government, his sentence may yet be overturned. Add your weight to the campaign by urging the Foreign Office to demand that his life be spared. Sign our e-petition at www.independent.co.uk/petition

There is no reason for Canadian troops to be dying for a country which is unable to embrace basic human rights and the most simple principles of civilization.

Hat tip Sam in comments and Cat via email.

Karzai negotiating with the Taliban? That's "naive", isn't it?

Leftdog is right. It's time to ask Harper exactly what the mission in Afghanistan is all about, particularly after this little announcement by Afghanistan's president Hamid Karzai.

President Hamid Karzai acknowledged for the first time Friday he has met with Taliban militants in attempts to bring peace to Afghanistan, which is struggling to quell a rising insurgency. Karzai's assertion -- immediately rejected as false by a Taliban spokesman -- came as a suicide car bomber killed four people and wounded four others in Kabul, and militants overran a district in the volatile southeast.

Talk to the Taliban? Isn't that "emboldening the terrorists"? Karzai added this:

"Afghan Taliban are always welcome, they belong to this country. ... They are the sons of this soil," Karzai said. "As they repent, as they regret, as they want to come back to their own country, they are welcome."

That goes to the line US senator Bill Frist was spouting in October 2006. It is the line Jack Layton was taking at the same time and from which he eventually backed away. It is the line the Conservatives were all calling "naive", as though it was a suggestion that wasn't even possible.

Now, we're hearing it from Karzai himself and it raises another question. Was the Canadian government aware that Karzai is talking with the Taliban? If so, why the disingenuous stance suggesting negotiation is not possible? If not, why are Canadian troops being used to support a policy we are not aware of nor in agreement with?

And a question for Peter MacKay. Who's naive now, dimwit?