Karzai brother accused of trafficking heroin

WASHINGTON - When Afghan security forces found an enormous cache of heroin hidden beneath concrete blocks in a tractor-trailer outside Kandahar in 2004, the local Afghan commander quickly impounded the truck and notified his boss.

Before long, the commander, Habibullah Jan, received a telephone call from Ahmed Wali Karzai, brother of President Hamid Karzai, asking him to release the vehicle and the drugs, Jan later told American investigators, according to notes from the debriefing obtained by The New York Times. He said he complied after getting a phone call from an aide to President Karzai directing him to release the truck.

Two years later, American and Afghan counternarcotics forces stopped another truck, this time near Kabul, and found more than 110 pounds of heroin. Soon afterward, US investigators told other American officials they had discovered links between the drug shipment and a bodyguard believed to be an intermediary for Ahmed Wali Karzai, according to a participant in the briefing.

The assertions about the involvement of the president's brother in the incidents were never investigated, according to American and Afghan officials, though allegations he benefited from narcotics trafficking have circulated widely in Afghanistan.

Both President Karzai and his brother, now chief of the Kandahar Provincial Council, the governing body for the region that includes Afghanistan's second-largest city, dismiss the allegations as politically motivated.

"I am not a drug dealer. I never was, and I never will be," the president's brother said in a recent phone interview. "I am a victim of vicious politics."

But assertions about him have deeply worried top American officials in Kabul and Washington.

US officials fear perceptions that the Afghan president might be protecting his brother are damaging his credibility and undermining US efforts to buttress his government, which has been under siege from rivals and a Taliban insurgency fueled by drug money.

The White House said it believes Ahmed Wali Karzai is involved in drug trafficking, and US officials have warned President Karzai that his brother is a liability, two senior Bush administration officials said last week.