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For at least three years it has been a bleeding wound of corruption, a showcase of the graft and racketeering that has quickened the erosion of the Karzai regime’s legitimacy.
Yet only now is the smuggling gateway known as Kabul Airport receiving its first tepid expressions of concern from the regime's international sponsors and the mainstream media. Evidently the emboldened Afghan president couldn't care less.
This week’s visit to Kabul by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is an indication that the Obama administration may at last be feeling the need to address the free-flow of black currency and goods through the airport.
At an estimated $10 million per day, a good deal of that cash stands to be pilfered American aid money. The loot is nothing less than the lifeblood of Afghanistan’s biggest criminal syndicates, coursing its way to laundering locales abroad.
Still, the airport scam has never been much of a secret, at least in official circles.
That’s why the image of an American Attorney General, tapping the shoulder of President Hamid Karzai’s chapan with disapproval, likely prompted only laughter among the crooked quisling’s cronies.
These backroom marketeers have gloried in the airport's open door, men like parliamentary minority leader Abdul Sayyaf and Nangahar governor Gul Agha Sherzai, as well as the president’s enterprising brothers Qayoom, Mahmoud and Wali, and his oily aide and minister, Farooq Wardak.
Why shouldn't they chuckle?
After all, it was one of Eric Holder’s predecessors, Alberto Gonzales, Attorney General to George W. Bush, who helped anoint the Afghan official most responsible for disabling effective policing at Kabul Airport: Abdul Jabar Sabet.
Staunchly Pashtun in ethnicity, Sabet was used by Karzai to shunt a respected Tajik lawman, Mahmood Daqiq, from the Afghan Attorney General’s post.
Within weeks of Sabet's installation as the regime’s top lawman, he mysteriously sent the airport’s crime-busting police general into exile (see Skyreporter’s Afghan Heroin series of film reports from 2007, starting from page 43 of Recent Stories).
Virtually overnight the smuggling of heroin, cash and other contraband soared, directly under the noses of the U.S., British and other foreign embassies located just a mile or two down Airport Road.
Ironies abound in this saga.
Not only did Sabet owe his job to backing from the American and British ambassadors of the time, his vendetta against the airport’s police general, Aminullah Amerkhel, was covered up by officials at the embassies, whose successors can now only complain about lax export controls.
Amerkhel was eventually exonerated and now heads security at the Ministry of Education. He is a candidate in this year’s parliamentary election.
Harsher fates awaited Gonzales and Sabet. Gonzales quit the Bush administration in 2007 amid accusations of abuse of office and perjury. Sabet was fired by Karzai in July of 2008. Footage was telecast of the old rogue, an avowed non-drinker, dancing like a whirling dervish at a booze-soaked party in the provinces.
Meantime smuggling has boomed at the Afghan capital’s key transport link to the outside world, clearly due to interference by officials at the top of the regime.
The current Attorney General, Ishaq Aloko, has complained that his investigations have been stifled from above. One blocked prosecution: an attempt to bring Aloko's predecessor Sabet to justice.
Thus far, only minor to medium offenders have come under the scrutiny of Afghan and U.S. investigators, according to one Kabul based diplomat familiar with ongoing probes.
The disgraced former Hajj minister, Mohammed Chakari, has been targeted in connection with the influential Kabul banker Mohammed Azimi. “Azimi is potentially quite large,” the diplomatic source tells Skyreporter, “but Chakari’s not substantial compared to the regime’s big fish.”
Chakari’s error was not unlike that of another former minister, who is suspected of taking a $30 million bribe for the awarding of a copper concession to the Chinese.
“These guys lacked broad connections, so they were easy cast-offs for Karzai. The really powerful individuals in moving currency out of Kabul are models of black market efficiency.
“Horizontally, vertically, they’re integrated across the board and covered up by high office holders right into the Presidential Palace. Until we put Karzai under a spotlight instead of toadying up to him, the cash will keep on flowing.”
Coming up on Skyreporter: the vertically integrated House of Karzai, a syndicate created and enriched by foreign tax dollars – and with its own international airport in the portfolio…
