Karzai’s brother to scale back role in Kandahar: NATO

By Dan De Luce

WASHINGTON – NATO commanders expect the controversial brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai to “stand out of the way” and play a less important role in Kandahar province, a top general said Wednesday.

Ahmad Wali Karzai

The NATO-led mission’s strategy in the pivotal Kandahar region aims to have Ahmed Wali Karzai, widely accused of corruption, gradually cede power to the governor of the province, Tooryalai Wesa, said British Major General Nick Carter.

“I think he will increasingly stand out of the way and allow the governor to do that governing. That is the strategy that we’re encouraging,” Carter told reporters by video link from Kandahar.

“And the early indications are that he is creating the space for the governor to fill,” Carter said.

The Afghan president’s younger half-brother, who serves as chairman of the provincial legislative council, is seen as a powerful figure in the Kandahar region and has been dogged by allegations he has links to the lucrative opium trade and private security firms.

He denies the charges but Western officials and analysts view him as a potential obstacle to winning the trust of local Afghans in Kandahar, amid a major operation by US and Afghan forces to break the Taliban’s influence in its spiritual heartland.

Carter, who leads the southern regional command for the NATO-led force in Afghanistan, sidestepped allegations swirling around the Afghan president’s brother but alluded to his tainted reputation.

“He would tell you — and he’s either a candidate for an Oscar, or he’s the most maligned man in Afghanistan — that he is trying to help his country, that he’s trying to help us and he’s trying to help his people,” Carter said.

Ahmed Wali Karzai also maintains that he would rather be watching his favorite English football club Chelsea than help rule Kandahar, he said.

“Now whether you believe it not, the key to this is if you make it clear to him, that it’s the governor that’s going to govern.”

The general said he expected the role of the governor of the province to gradually expand while Karzai and other members of the provincial council would play more of an advisory role.

“That is what is currently underway. And we will very much judge success by the extent to which that balance switches,” he said.

Kandahar is a make-or-break battleground in US-led efforts to defeat the Taliban insurgency after more than eight years of war, with foreign troops focusing their attention on the city and province of the same name.

While the Taliban does not control Kandahar city, it dominates some rural areas to the south and NATO and Afghan forces face a “military challenge” in clearing out the insurgents from those districts, he said.

In Kandahar city, with a population of about 500,000, Afghans face chaotic conditions marked by crime, a shortage of electricity and the absence of a reliable local government or police force, he said.

In Kandahar, “it’s a problem more of criminality and disorder than it is a problem of Taliban and insurgency,” he said.

Carter said he hoped that military and political efforts underway would show results by the fall, with Afghans in Kandahar enjoying improved security and services from their local government.

In the neighboring province of Helmand, a coalition offensive around the district of Marjah in February had freed up travel on main roads once controlled by the Taliban, allowed eight of 15 schools to reopen and launched a new local government, the general said.

But reviving government services and winning the trust of local residents was a slow, “frustrating” process, with the Taliban still exerting “subtle” intimidation to discourage Afghans from siding with the new authorities, Carter added.

Pentagon puts pressure on Hamid Karzai over corruption

By Adam Entous Adam Entous

KABUL: The Pentagon’s top military officer followed his commander-in-chief to Kabul on Monday to keep up pressure on President Hamid Karzai to tackle corruption, which he said could ruin the war’s new strategy.

President Barack Obama inspects a guard of honor with Afghan President Hamid Karzai at the Presidential …

Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, arrived less than a day after President Barack Obama made the first trip of his presidency there, bringing a stern message that Karzai needs to do more to fight graft.

Obama’s strategy, backed by 30,000 more troops this year, enters its most ambitious phase with a major offensive starting in June in the Taliban’s birthplace Kandahar, where the top provincial official is Karzai’s half brother, Ahmad Wali Karzai.

Mullen described Kandahar as Afghanistan’s “center of gravity” and the key to reversing the Taliban’s momentum.

But he said the whole strategy could fail if Karzai does not do more to fight corruption in his brother’s southern fiefdom.

“We will be unable to succeed in Kandahar if we cannot eliminate a vast majority of corruption there and set up a legitimate governance structure,” he told reporters.

“If we can’t do that there, then we will not be able to succeed. We can succeed militarily, but it’s not going to work. That’s just a fact.”

Asked if Ahmad Wali Karzai should be sidelined, Mullen said: “I think that’s something that President Karzai’s going to have to figure out … addressing the corruption and governance issues in Kandahar. It’s not for us to figure out.”

But a senior U.S. military official went further.

“I’d like him out of there,” the official said on condition of anonymity, talking of Ahmad Wali Karzai.

“We’d rather not have a guy like that down there because he’s so divisive. But there’s nothing that we can do unless we can link him to the insurgency, then we can put him on the (target list) and capture and kill him,” the official said.

KANDAHAR CAMPAIGN

As head of Kandahar’s provincial council Ahmad Wali Karzai wields considerable power in the south, but has been accused of amassing a vast fortune from the drugs trade, intimidating rivals and having links to the CIA; charges he strongly denies.

But there was no plan to target Ahmad Wali Karzai as yet. “We’re not going in that direction,” the senior official said. “The president of this country is the one that has to decide what to do with that guy.”

Ahmad Wali Karzai has taken on added importance for the United States ahead of an offensive to take control of Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second largest city, and the province around it.

Important elements of the Kandahar campaign, including outreach to tribal leaders, were already well under way, military officials said, and would intensify in the coming weeks with greater involvement by Karzai and other officials.

Pointing to a calendar, one of the officials indicated the month of June as the likely start of the offensive.

U.S. forces hope to take some areas in and around Kandahar without a fight by reaching agreements with local tribal leaders, but the operation is expected to include a main thrust of roughly 10,000 troops for areas to be “cleared” by force.

“The key thing is we’ve got to be done with that by Ramadan,” the second official said, referring to the Muslim holy month of fasting that begins in August.

The campaign would then shift from a “clearing” phase to a “secure and deliver government” phase, expected to last at least until mid-October, he said.

The timetable for the Kandahar campaign, the most detailed made public to date, highlights the limited window available to U.S. and NATO forces to turn the tide against the Taliban before a review of war strategy in late November or early December.

That review will assess whether the U.S.-led campaign and the training of the Afghan army and police have gained enough ground to allow a gradual U.S. withdrawal to begin in July 2011.

While U.S. and European leaders accept that a deal with the Taliban is the only way to end the war, Mullen played down the chances of a political agreement in the short term.

“I think it is premature. There’s no one that I’ve spoken to, at least on the American side, or actually, on the coalition side, that doesn’t think we need to proceed from a position of strength,” Mullen said. “In my judgment, we’re not there yet.”

Karzai this week held preliminary peace talks with Hezb-i-Islami, one of the smaller insurgent factions. Karzai is also holding a major peace conference in Kabul in early May.

SECURITY AND GOVERNANCE

In addition to cleaning up Afghan governance, Obama’s strategy hinges on building up the country’s army and police forces to take over security responsibility, a process that has been hamstrung by a shortage of international trainers.

The United States has struggled to convince its NATO allies in Afghanistan to fill the shortfall, and Mullen said one option might be to send more U.S. trainers to fill the gap.

“We’ve asked and pushed our other partners to provide as many as possible. That continues … We’ve come up short a few hundred,” Mullen said.

Aides to Mullen said the Pentagon did not currently envision a need to add trainers on top of the troop increase ordered by Obama in December.