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He was the smooth-talking Western ambassador who gladly accepted trinkets and praise from the enfeebled president of Afghanistan.
Indeed when Canada’s Arif Lalani was marking the end of his Kabul posting on July 31, 2008, he made sure that a Canadian photographer was on hand at the presidential palace to snap him receiving a medal from a gushing Hamid Karzai.
By that time most other foreign governments were distancing themselves from Karzai’s teetering regime. Western diplomats, including Canadians, were advising their political masters to discipline Karzai and his ministers, or risk seeing the government's tenuous legitimacy collapse completely.
But Arif Lalani and his superiors in Canada’s Conservative government were staunch in their support for Karzai - and busy staunching unflattering facts about his ministries and security services, as has now been confirmed by a Foreign Affairs whistleblower.
Richard Colvin, a senior field investigator who went on to serve as Lalani’s number two at the Canadian Embassy, has accused officials including Lalani and David Mulroney, the former head of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Afghan task force, of censoring his reports about the abuse of prisoners transferred by Canadian troops to the Karzai regime’s security services.
In fact, during the ambassador's tenure in Kabul from April 2007 to August 2008, Lalani consistently squelched evidence of incompetence and corruption, notably in the Afghan government’s ministries of Interior and Defence, and the Attorney General’s office – as reported by Skyreporter at the time.
No other individual branch of the government has soaked up more Canadian tax dollars than the Interior Ministry, responsible for policing. At least $80 million has been invested since 2002 with disappointing results. As much as one third of the money intended for police salaries has been siphoned off, with virtually no way to account for the lost funds.
“Lalani’s secrecy and censorship led to misunderstandings and poor decisions,” one high-ranking Canadian diplomat has told Skyreporter. He has asked that his name be withheld out of concern that his words will provoke the same harsh denunciation meted out last week by Harper government officials over the prisoner abuse revelations.
“Lalani and David Mulroney were able to enforce a very narrow agenda, with no links leading back to them. It created a culture of non-accountability. Canadians really have no idea why the overall Afghan mission is doing so poorly, or who’s responsible.
“The degree of cynicism juxtaposed with the importance of the mission just left me cold. I mean, our troops are putting everything on the line, but critical problems with Karzai’s bunch were just being swept under the carpet. It has compromised the entire mission. It was really, really depressing.”
As revealed here previously, this sentiment was shared by other Canadian officials. Frustration roiled up at Foreign Affairs, the Department of National Defence and within the Afghan Task Force itself - in large part due to the systematic stifling of evidence about wrongdoing in Kabul.
Boss David Mulroney was dubbed “the rodent” for seizing upon “anything that looked off-script” and hiding the offending information “someplace deep and dark”.
According to another Canadian official tasked with responsibilities on the Afghan file, “Lalani was incredibly arrogant when he was named ambassador. He made it clear he was gunning for (General Rick) Hillier and intended to 'rein in' the military.
“Even the PMO came to see him as a loose cannon, but with Mulroney he went to war on the Canadian Forces. The two of them were jubilant over the SAT being shut down.”
The Strategic Advisory Team, or SAT, was a specialist group of military officers and foreign affairs officials who advised the Karzai government’s ministries in Kabul. It was disbanded at the end of Lalani's term.
Skyreporter emailed a request for comment to Arif Lalani several days ago, but has received no response. David Mulroney, aside from granting two background telephone interviews to this reporter in June of 2007, has consistently refused to go on the record regarding stories published here.
Regarding Lalani, a quick search of his quotes from 2007 and 2008 points to his tendency to play down bad news, regardless of contrary evidence.
For instance on August 1, 2008, the day after receiving his medal from Karzai, he was quoted as saying that “we’ve had progress” on civilian casualties, and that the problem “has become less of an issue.”
Six months later, in February of 2009, the U.N. reported that the civilian death toll in 2008 was the highest of any year since the start of the campaign against the Taliban, with U.S., NATO and Afghan forces responsible for 39% of the deaths. Washington’s incoming commanding general, Stanley McChrystal, admitted in May of this year that much more needs to be done to avoid killing innocent Afghans.
Earlier in Lalani’s posting, in September of 2007, the ambassador was quoted as saying that he saw “definite improvement in the security situation” where Canadian troops were active in the Kandahar region, and that “we are actually becoming able to do more development and reconstruction work.”
Even at the time, this was not a claim borne out by facts on the ground.
This reporter’s meeting with Ambassador Arif Lalani in May of 2007 revealed much about the man and his remit from the Harper government. He was new to Kabul, and responded to my request for an interview by suggesting that we meet for tea.
I invited him to the Serena Hotel, which at that time had not yet been targeted by Taliban suicide bombers and gunmen.
At first, Lalani was all questions. But gradually, he became pensive and aloof. He clearly didn’t enjoy hearing about the exploits of the regime’s rogue Attorney General, Abdul Jabar Sabet, or the harrowing experiences of Canadian law enforcement advisers, who were trying to trace police funding under Interior Minister Zarar Muqbul.
I told him about the heroin trafficking scandal at Kabul Airport, just down the road. And was he aware that the Pentagon was filling the pockets of Hamid Wardak, the son of the regime’s defence minister, with contracts for his father’s Afghan National Army?
(For these and other stories of the time, please see pages 25 through 38 in Recent Stories. For more on Lalani, see Canada’s Political Culture Warped By Afghan Fears, posted Sept. 12, 2007; and from Oct. 8, 2007: West’s Political Double-Talk Trumped By Taliban Brutality.)
Lalani had come to the Serena expecting to offer a profile of himself, a kind of first-week-on-the-job story. Instead, he was getting a tour of the House of Karzai, rife with profiteers, carpetbaggers and heroin Khans.
I asked him point blank if the Harper government was serious about rooting out corruption. He voiced good intentions, but avoided specifics.
Had he heard what honest Afghans in the ministries and parliament were saying? That our Western governments had created Karzai, and that it was our responsibility to do some house cleaning?
And what about Canadians? I asked the ambassador how he thought the Canadian public would respond when the truth surfaced about the Afghan government they had helped pay for, and for which their sons and daughters were dying on the battlefield.
Lalani’s response nearly knocked me off my chair.
“Arthur,” he said with a smile, “do you really see the networks and newspapers taking an interest in anything other than Kandahar? I’ll try to get them to come to Kabul, to report on the terrific progress we’ve made here. But don’t pin your hopes on anyone back home taking an interest in little details behind the scenes.”
What a difference two years has made. Those “little details” have come to define the Karzai government, and cripple it. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, for one, calls it “a by-word for corruption.”
Coming soon on Skyreporter, another of those “little details”: where has all that money gone?
