Skyreporter has secured documentary evidence that President Hamid Karzai’s former Attorney General, Abdul Jabar Sabet, who was fired by Karzai in July, is to be apprehended by police and brought back to Kabul for formal investigation.

A leaked letter from Sabet’s successor, Ishaq Alako, addressed to the Ministry of Interior, states that Alako feels there is probable cause to contemplate criminal charges against Sabet, and that a travel ban must be enforced against the fugitive.

Sabet has vanished from Kabul and is said to have sought refuge with powerful friends in another province.

The development is a huge embarrassment for the U.S., British and Canadian governments, among others. Sabet was promoted by Karzai from a lowly lawyer’s post to the AG’s office in August, 2006 - at the urging of officials from both the U.S. and British embassies in Kabul.

When Sabet’s abuse of power was examined in depth here at skyreporter (pls see our Afghan Heroin series of film reports in Recent Stories) Canadian officials, including those in Foreign Affairs and Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s office, refused any comment in response to questions about Sabet’s wrongdoing and his connections to Canada.

This had the dual effect of concealing one of the Karzai regime’s most glaring examples of official corruption, while frustrating attempts by honest Afghan lawmen and parliamentarians to clean up their struggling young government. 

Among the specific allegations put 18 months ago to top Canadian officials, including former Ambassador Arif Lalani, were:

- that Sabet had evidently obtained Canadian status after entering the country on false pretences

- that Sabet continued to boast of an ability to travel to and from Canada

- that Sabet was displaying sudden newfound wealth at odds with his modest official salary as Attorney General

Not only were skyreporter’s questions not answered, but the PMO, Foreign Affairs and Ambassador Lalani shunned any and all further communications with this correspondent.

Here’s a more detailed account of the man the Government of Canada has been helping to shield. These are exerpts from “Covering Up Karzai & Co.”, first published in the summer, 2007 edition of Policy Options, the monthly publication of Canada’s Institute for Research on Public Policy:

The sheer scope of fraud within the regime’s ministries has caused a collapse of public trust. So much so that Hamid Karzai’s corrupt dominion arguably constitutes a greater threat to the long-term security of Afghanistan than anything those back-country no-hopers known as the Taliban are capable of mustering on the battlefield…

The Harper government, by accepting a subservient role to the Bush administration’s deeply flawed political and diplomatic approach to Afghanistan, has allowed itself to become trapped into providing public relations cover for a Kabul regime that is desperately in need of a complete overhaul. Rather than trying to effect the necessary repairs, Canadian diplomats and civil servants have been reduced to two main functions:  making excuses for the regime’s failures, and lowering expectations for the future.

Afghanistan’s genuine democrats say that by perpetuating the Karzai administration’s myth of viability, nations like Canada are smothering attempts to root out corruption and get on with winning the peace. “It is a disaster for the Afghan people,” despairs Ramazan Bashar Dost, a popular member of parliament from Kabul. “Mr. Karzai doesn’t really want to fight corruption, and the international community, too, doesn’t have the will to fight corruption in Afghanistan.”

A walk through the crumbling architecture of the Karzai regime is like stumbling through a fun house on the midway, with warped mirrors reflecting a weird array of characters, all of them darting mischievously among the shadows. Some, in truth, are honourable appointees, trying their best for the country, while others are impostors, clowns – and, predominantly, villains…

At a news conference in March, 2007, reporters in Kabul asked openly if widespread rumours about President Karzai’s younger brother Wali’s connections with Kandahar’s drug trade were being investigated.

“That’s just anti-Karzai propaganda,” came the reply from the president’s Attorney General, Abdul Jabar Sabet. “I’ve seen no evidence of this.”

Could this be because the Attorney General is looking the other way? That’s the suspicion of Sabet’s critics in parliament. Supporters of one of his victims, the respected former chief of border police at Kabul Airport, General Aminullah Amerkhel, don’t mince words:  Sabet, they say, was acting on behalf of Kabul’s leading druglords when he had Amerkhel removed from his post last October (Oct, 2006).

Circumstantial evidence appears damning. Amerkhel was an accomplished drug-buster: his face had become well known to viewers of Afghanistan’s TV news channels as he and his men nabbed smugglers almost daily. Then, last year, he challenged corruption up the chain of command. He told reporters that too often, he would arrest a courier - kilogram bags of pure heroin in hand - only to see the smuggler released the next day, on orders from above.

Since Amerkhel’s suspension by Sabet, arrests have plummeted. Only five traffickers have been collared at the airport in the past six months. Amerkhel regularly racked up five or six per week.

So is Hamid Karzai’s Attorney General really in league with the heroin gangs? It’s a question that should interest the government of Canada for at least two reasons. First, heroin profits help finance the Taliban's war effort. Second, Sabet boasts to friends of enjoying residency in Canada:  his wife and children live in Montreal. Yet officials in Ottawa - at Foreign Affairs, Immigration and the Prime Minister’s Office - have refused since mid-March, 2007 to confirm the status of President Karzai’s rogue Attorney General.

Sabet’s past is littered with reasons that he should never have gained entry into Canada, particularly due to his long history of association with the black prince of Afghan extremists, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Sabet was a longtime counsellor to Hekmatyar, once the United States' most-favoured anti-Soviet guerrilla leader, but now on their most-wanted list of terrorists.

In 1992, Sabet's continuing links with Hekmatyar led to his dismissal from a job at the Voice of America in Washington D.C. He was denied residency in the United States.

Sabet turned next to Canada, immigrating with his family to Montreal in 1999, where he became a familiar face at the downtown mosque, Masjid as-Salam. Sources within Montreal’s Afghan community confirm that Sabet portrayed himself as a simple refugee to gain residency, and that he failed to disclose the previous denial of re-entry into the U.S. Thus he allegedly committed two “material misrepresentations” with regard to Canadian regulations. Sabet is said to have collected welfare until his return to Kabul in 2003, where he picked up a lawyer’s position at the Interior Ministry.

Then, in an ironic twist typical of U.S. policy in Afghanistan, Sabet used his smooth command of English to form a relationship with a U.S. Justice Department adviser who was seeking favourable reviews of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.

As a result, Sabet led an Afghan government inspection of the site, declaring afterward that there were "only one or two" complaints from prisoners, and that "conditions of the jail were humane. The rumours about prison conditions were all wrong."

Soon after, both the U.S. and British embassies in Kabul began lobbying for Mr. Sabet's promotion, according to an aide of President Karzai's who witnessed the sessions. Mr. Sabet was nominated as attorney general just months later. How that nomination was approved by parliament says much about the power structure in Kabul.

In order to insure enough votes for Sabet, a deal was brokered by Karzai’s aides between the candidate and a key Karzai ally, Abdul Sayyaf. This brigand is one of Afghanistan’s most feared warlords, a leading force of disunity among the militias that devastated Kabul in the civil war of the early 1990’s. Today, Sayyaf’s an MP - and leader of the parliamentary minority.

In return for Sabet lending support to the controversial amnesty bill that Sayyaf and other accused war criminals pushed through the house earlier this year, the nominee secured his confirmation as Attorney General. Since then, Sayyaf’s hold over Sabet has strengthened.

Sayyaf is frequently accused of land grabbing by citizens of villages to the west and north of the capital. A British lawyer happened to be in Sabet’s office when one such dispute came forward. A grieving widow alleged that her home had been occupied by one of Sayyaf’s militia commanders. The Attorney General listened for a time, then leaned across his desk and yanked the letter of complaint from the widow’s hands. He tore it up and ordered her to leave.

According to a senior Justice Ministry source, most if not all of Sabet’s key staff appointments have been cleared through Sayyaf, particularly that of his deputy of narcotics affairs, General Stanakzai. This left Sayyaf with two trusted henchmen in key counter-narcotics posts:  earlier, he had used his influence to place a close aide named Sadat in the Interior Ministry’s hierarchy.

Sabet, meanwhile, has been equally determined to succeed in the game of connections. Just days after securing the Attorney General’s chair in August, 2006, he elevated a minor police officer named Nadir Hamidi to the rank of full general and made him his deputy. Within weeks, Gen. Nadir - known widely as “Choor,” or briber - fled Afghanistan to Dubai, his pockets stuffed with several hundred thousand dollars of state funds.

Sabet ducked accusations that he’d helped Nadir escape. Then he made an even more disruptive appointment. General Kasim is a former security chief of Baghlan province, north of Kabul. A Hekmatyar loyalist like Sabet, he was facing corruption charges – until the Attorney General had his file wiped clean and installed him as chief of Kabul’s District Ten police station.

There, he’s been a useful tool for Sabet’s barnstorming “anti-vice” raids on foreign-owned Kabul restaurants. (In one incident in February, 2007, Kasim’s men helped themselves to seized alcohol, according to foreign aid workers who witnessed the raid. An hour later, one of the expats was stopped at a checkpoint and beaten by policemen “whose breath reeked of vodka.” He filed a complaint, which now languishes at the Interior Ministry.)

More spectacularly, Kasim and his men have been the Attorney General’s storm troopers in putting the squeeze on Kabul’s vibrant young news media. On April 17th, 2007, enraged by the coverage of one of his speeches by Tolo TV, Afghanistan’s most popular independent channel, Sabet ordered Kasim and more than a hundred armed policemen to bring the errant journalists to his office.

The police stormed Tolo TV’s studios, arresting seven journalists, including four from other agencies covering the raid. Several of the reporters were rifle-butted and punched.

All of this occurred without warrants, as in the Amerkhel case. Saad Mohseni, Tolo TV’s director, protested:  "Sabet has shown that he is totally unfit to hold his position. Our international allies must tell the president this type of official is not acceptable to the Afghan people."

The U.N. agreed, denouncing the raid as “unlawful.” But from the U.S. and its NATO allies, including Canada, there has been only silence. President Karzai, feeling no heat from his foreign sponsors and pressured by allies like Sayyaf, an avowed foe of the news media, had only this to say:  “The Attorney General we have today is one that is in a head-on clash with the bad guys.”

The concurrent practices of going soft on criminals while cracking down on the media should tell the people of western democracies everything they need to know about the Karzai regime, say its critics.

“We are facing the old difficulties of Afghanistan’s history in the last 25 years,” says Shukria Barakzai. “Who is there who isn’t working for his own pocket, who is there who isn’t a warlord or criminal?

“The president is completely isolated from the people. He only listens to this mafia group inside the palace.”

Whose reach, the evidence shows, goes far into the countryside.