Kabul: American officials believe a powerful brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and an ally in the Taliban heartland of Kandahar, is a corrupt drugs baron, leaked US documents showed Monday.
The president's younger half-brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, who serves as chairman of Kandahar's legislative council, has long been dogged by allegations of unsavoury links to the lucrative opium trade and private security firms.
But as a powerful figure in the pivotal southern province, where US and Afghan forces are concentrating efforts to break a nine-year Taliban insurgency, Western officials have stayed quiet publicly on his tainted record.
Documents from the US embassy in Kabul among the flood of diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks revealed their true feelings.
"While we must deal with AWK (Ahmed Wali Karzai) as the head of the provincial council, he is widely understood to be corrupt and a narcotics trafficker," said one note that followed a meeting between the president's brother and US envoy Frank Ruggiero in September 2009.
Of the meeting itself, the report said Karzai "dressed in a crisp white shalwar kameez and pinstriped vest, appeared nervous, though eager to express his views on the international presence in Kandahar."
In May, British Major General Nick Carter, then NATO commander in southern Afghanistan, said he hoped Karzai would gradually cede power to the governor of the province, Tooryalai Wesa.
Kandahar is a make-or-break battleground in the US-led fight to defeat the insurgency, where the United States has poured in thousands of extra troops to wrest the initiative from the Taliban and bolster the Afghan government.