Email This Story
He’s a disgraced former minister whose nomination by President Karzai to the country’s top anti-drugs post is “an absolute travesty” in the words of one British official. Zarar Muqbul presided over the looting of up to a third of Canadian, British and EU donations to the Afghan National Police.
Yet Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and his aides and ministers, continue to stonewall requests for comment – as they have done since Skyreporter first broke Muqbul’s story three years ago (see Karzai Mocks Canada in Breaking News and Afghan Quagmire Silences Parliament in Recent Stories on our homepage).
One of the PM’s spokeswomen, Sara MacIntyre, contacted by telephone this past Monday morning, stated that she would call back or email in response to Skyreporter’s request for comment from her boss. Two days passed prior to the Haiti emergency, and no such response was forthcoming.
That’s strange, considering how freely and fluently another Ottawa-based official speaks about the menace of Zarar Muqbul.
Who might that be?
None other than Jawed Ludin, Karzai’s Ambassador to Canada, and the Afghan president’s former chief of staff.
“In a microcosm, the problem with the whole of Afghanistan was Muqbil,” Ludin was quoted in the New York Times magazine on August 4th of last year, three months after his appointment as Ambassador to Canada.
Ludin continued: “To what extent do you blame Karzai? On the one hand, the British ambassador and friends would tell him Zarar was incompetent and should be removed. On the other, the American would praise him and say he’s doing a fine job. And the Americans were the largest donor to police reform.”
The euphemism “incompetent” is often used by Karzai regime apologists when referring to corruption. The Guardian’s treatment of the story, “Karzai selects sacked minister for key post”, published this past Sunday, January 10th was more plainly worded:
"A British former law and order official who worked in Afghanistan during Moqbel's time at the interior ministry said his nomination as the country's top anti-drugs official was "an absolute travesty".
"Under his rule the [ministry] became a byword for corruption and incompetence, and the idea that Karzai now thinks it's appropriate that he would take the lead at the ministry of counter-narcotics is just ridiculous," the former official said."
Even the Afghan Embassy's news bulletin from Ottawa, No. 2545 for January 11th, includes a London Times article featuring this:
"The new list includes a former Interior Minister, Zarar Moqbel, who was sacked in 2007 (sic) amid allegations of corruption and incompetence."
As reported by Skyreporter on Oct. 12 2008, Karzai removed Muqbul from his Interior Ministry post and reassigned him, but the chastened rogue failed to turn up for work as Refugees Minister. In 2009, however, Muqbul served as Karzai’s “campaign manager” in his home province of Parwan for the fraud-blighted presidential election.
“Muqbul is at the center of our problem with corruption,” says an Afghan security source, who requests that his name be withheld. “We have known Zarar Muqbul since the jehad, when he served under our great Amir Ahmed Shah Massoud.
“But since his elevation to high office by Karzai, he has enriched himself at the expense of the Afghan people. When he came to Kabul in 2001, his family had a shop in Charikar and a small land holding. Now he’s worth millions, on a salary of less than $3,000 a month.”
Karzai’s appointment of Muqbul as his new “counter-narcotics minister” makes a grim kind of sense in the Afghan regime’s upper echelons of power.
The president’s most powerful ally is Abdul Sayyaf, a militia commander who heads Afghanistan’s parliamentary minority. As detailed in Skyreporter’s exposé of Muqbul, one of Sayyaf’s strong suits is his ability to insert underlings in key anti-trafficking posts, as he did during Muqbul’s tenure at Interior.
Criminality in and around the regime surged during those years, 2005 through 2008.
Canada’s official silence on this affair comes at a sensitive time. At the end of January, Karzai will attend the emergency London conference of Afghanistan’s international sponsors, where he will demand that more foreign aid be pumped directly into his regime’s ministries.
Will that include injecting scarce Western tax dollars into Zarar Muqbul’s Ministry of Counter-Narcotics? Not if honest Afghan parliamentarians can block his nomination, as they seem determined to do. (See Update below.)
Canadian MPs, meantime, can only watch from the sidelines. Prime Minister Harper has suspended, or prorogued, Canada's parliament until early March - even while Canada’s troops remain squarely in the crosshairs of the Afghan war.
In Kandahar and elsewhere, Canadian soldiers have distinguished themselves with their selfless commitment to their mission, a big cut above the illustrious suits who deign to command them, who would appear to be obsessed only with information control and clinging to power with their minority government.
Little wonder Hamid Karzai shuns Mr. Harper’s advice, and just gets on with what the Afghan president does best: purging any last vestige of legitimacy from his regime.
Update: On Saturday January 16, enough votes were mustered in the Afghan parliament to confirm Zarar's appointment as the regime's new Counter-Narcotics Minister. See Breaking News above: Karzai's Bent Ex-Minister Secures Anti-Heroin Role.
