Ahmed Wali Karzai: CIA Employee of the Month

Ahmed Wali Karzai is one busy guy. Not only does he play an important role in the administration of his brother, Afghan President Hamid Karzai, he's also said to be one of Afghanistan's biggest drug lords, and, according to today's the New York Times, Ahmed has also been on the CIA's payroll for the past eight years.

The story goes that Ahmed Wali Karzai has been helping the CIA battle insurgent and Taliban groups in and around Kandahar, his base of operations in southern Afghanistan. Thus AW Karzai is a valuable asset, in CIA terms, in the fight against insurgents in Afghanistan. Of course since he's also (allegedly) one of the country's biggest drug lords, and since the opium trade is a major source of funding for the insurgents/Taliban, AW Karzai can also be said to be a valuable asset too for those working against the CIA/NATO/US military efforts to defeat the insurgency in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, according to the London Telegraph, Ahmed Wali's brother Hamid is working hard to rig the second round of the Afghan presidential election. Karzai's camp has refused requests from his challenger, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, to fire the head of Afghanistan's Independent Election Commission, the group that oversaw the fraudulent first round of voting. Nor will Karzai agree to close hundreds of polling stations in the south of Afghanistan that helped to turn in the nearly one million phony votes cast for him during the first round of the election.

Without these changes the International Crisis Group, a well-respected international affairs NGO, is warning that there is no reason to expect the second round of voting to be any more legitimate than the fraud-plagued first round. Nor they say does the international community seem to "either [have] the time, political will or resources available" to prevent Hamid Karzai from stealing Round Two.

The Karzai Brothers...perhaps this is a good time to again ask what are we doing in Afghanistan anyway?