Why it's so hard to negotiate with the Taliban

GRAEME SMITH

From Wednesday's Globe and Mail

October 8, 2008 at 1:26 AM EDT

KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN — In the spring of 2007, a Taliban commander brought a small delegation of insurgents to Kabul for a secret meeting with Sibghatullah Mojaddedi, the former Afghan president who leads a reconciliation program for insurgents who want to stop fighting.

But the talks quickly turned sour. Mr. Mojaddedi gave the Taliban delegation $10 to cover the expenses of the dangerous journey and waved them away, telling them to come back later.

“It was an insult,” said the Taliban leader, his skin darkened by years on sun-baked battlefields. “They're not serious.”

Nothing in the recent months of war has changed that impression. The government and its backers have failed to persuade insurgents that they're taking the idea of negotiations seriously, and the Taliban themselves haven't shown any real enthusiasm for talks.

Pakistani Taliban militants visit
the mosque where a suicide attack
wounded 30, in Bara, a troubled
town in the Khyber tribal region
about 15 kilometers from Peshawar,
Pakistan on May 1, 2008.
(Mohammad Zubair/Associated Press)

Despite a much-publicized meeting in Saudi Arabia last month that included representatives from all sides, negotiators have hardly started to bridge the chasm between the players in the conflict.

The subject of negotiations has come up more than once recently in comments from high-ranking officials – from Britain's top commander in Afghanistan to the senior United Nations official in the country – who have argued that a military solution is not feasible and that a negotiated settlement will be necessary.

A spokesman for Afghan President Hamid Karzai has previously admitted that his government's calls for negotiations in recent years have been in part an effort to split the already fractious insurgency into camps that support or oppose a mediated settlement.

Sections of the Taliban movement and their allied groups hold different views about their political aims in the war: While agreeing on expelling foreign troops, they have contrasting visions about what might happen next.

Insurgents in southern Afghanistan have burned schools and executed teachers in front of their students, for example, while a researcher for The Globe and Mail recently recorded video of armed Taliban touring a school in the central province of Wardak, where insurgents claimed to be protecting, funding, and even supplying books for schools. Those disagreements between insurgent factions have occasionally turned bloody, with three sources reporting a gunfight last month between Taliban and their local allies from Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hizb-i-Islami network.

In that context, observers say, it's not surprising that hints of progress on negotiations frequently emerge from authorities in Kabul. As the war grows, and the government's position looks increasingly weak, raising the idea of negotiations brings a rare piece of hopeful news to the capital.

For similar reasons, the Taliban have vehemently denied they're engaged in any kind of discussions, as the insurgents try to keep their fighters united and motivated. Taliban spokesman Qari Yousef Ahmadi announced yesterday that peace talks have not happened.

The Taliban's website, Voice of Jehad, also carried a statement this week from Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, clarifying his previously reported comments that the Taliban had made contact with their opponents. A meeting did occur during a meal to celebrate the Eid holiday, Mr. Zaeef said, but the participants were visiting Saudi Arabia only for the sake of a pilgrimage, or umrah, to the holy land and did not discuss the situation in Afghanistan.

It does not appear that the insurgents completely reject the idea of talks, but their framework for negotiations is unacceptable to the government and its foreign supporters.

In his comments on the Taliban site, Mr. Zaeef said: “I believe talks should be held without putting any condition by either side. … The government's condition means to recognize the government, which Taliban will not accept.”

He continued: “The talks should be unconditional and the U.S. should also present its stance, while the withdrawal of foreign troops, the future of Afghanistan and several other issues should be discussed.”

Mr. Ahmadi, the Taliban spokesman, made similar comments, repeating the insurgents' long-standing refusal to talk while foreign troops remain in Afghanistan.

For his part, Mr. Karzai has always said that any talks must respect the new constitution of Afghanistan. The Afghan President also cannot satisfy the Taliban's demands for a troop withdrawal before talks happen, observers say.

Even Waheed Muzhta, a former Taliban foreign ministry official who lives in Kabul and wrote a nostalgic book about the previous Taliban government, says he does not favour an immediate pullout of foreign troops. Although he would like to see them leave eventually, and perhaps take a less aggressive role as they try to find a political solution to the conflict, Mr. Muzhta conceded in a recent interview that a quick withdrawal of international forces would spark a vastly bloodier civil war.

But the former Taliban official emphasized that the burden now falls on Mr. Karzai and his foreign supporters to show greater flexibility about their terms for peace. Like his U.S. counterparts, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has often said negotiations must be handled by the Afghan government, despite calls from some Taliban or ex-Taliban figures, such as Mullah Zaeef, for direct involvement by the international military forces. Speaking with reporters this week, Mr. Harper also repeated a caveat he has used in the past, saying talks can happen “provided these people are willing to participate in the democratic and constitutional process.”

U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates used a similar phrase this week, endorsing a reconciliation process with “people who are willing to work with the Afghan government.”

Such people are difficult to find in Afghanistan these days, and the short-term prospects for peace are slim.

U.S. Study Is Said to Warn of Crisis in Afghanistan

By MARK MAZZETTI and ERIC SCHMITT

Published: October 8, 2008

WASHINGTON — A draft report by American intelligence agencies concludes that Afghanistan is in a “downward spiral” and casts serious doubt on the ability of the Afghan government to stem the rise in the Taliban’s influence there, according to American officials familiar with the document.

Rafiq Maqbool/Associated Press
A boy looked toward a construction
site near a refugee camp this week
in Kabul, Afghanistan.

The classified report finds that the breakdown in central authority in Afghanistan has been accelerated by rampant corruption within the government of President Hamid Karzai and by an increase in violence by militants who have launched increasingly sophisticated attacks from havens in Pakistan.

The report, a nearly completed version of a National Intelligence Estimate, is set to be finished after the November elections and will be the most comprehensive American assessment in years on the situation in Afghanistan. Its conclusions represent a harsh verdict on decision-making in the Bush administration, which in the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks made Afghanistan the central focus of a global campaign against terrorism.

Beyond the cross-border attacks launched by militants in neighboring Pakistan, the intelligence report asserts that many of Afghanistan’s most vexing problems are of the country’s own making, the officials said.

The report cites gains in the building of Afghanistan’s national army, the officials said. But they said it also laid out in stark terms what it described as the destabilizing impact of the booming heroin trade, which by some estimates accounts for 50 percent of Afghanistan’s economy.

The Bush administration has initiated a major review of its Afghanistan policy and has decided to send additional troops to the country. The downward slide in the security situation in Afghanistan has also become an issue in the presidential campaign, along with questions about whether the White House emphasis in recent years on the war in Iraq has been misplaced.

Inside the government, reports issued by the Central Intelligence Agency for more than two years have chronicled the worsening violence and rampant corruption inside Afghanistan, and some in the agency say they believe that it has taken the White House too long to respond to the warnings.

Henry A. Crumpton, a career C.I.A. officer who last year stepped down as the State Department’s top counterterrorism official, attributed some of Afghanistan’s problems to a “lack of leadership” both at the White House and in European capitals where commitments to rebuild Afghanistan after 2001 have never been met.

Mr. Crumpton, who was in charge of the C.I.A. teams that entered Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks but who said he had not seen the draft report, said that Afghanistan was “bad and getting worse” and that officials in Washington were just beginning to wake up to the problem.

“It’s taken them a long time to realize it, but now they know it’s pretty grim,” he said.

A National Intelligence Estimate is a formal document that reflects the consensus judgments of all 16 American intelligence agencies. Although the Bush administration has made public the crucial findings from some recent N.I.E.’s on Iraq and terrorism, most remain classified. The assessment on Afghanistan is the first since the Taliban regained strength there beginning in 2006 and launched an offensive that has allowed them to seize large swaths of territory.

The draft intelligence report was described by more than a half dozen current government officials who had read its conclusions. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because the report remains classified and has not been completed.

Richard Willing, a spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which produces the national intelligence assessments, declined to comment for this article. A White House spokesman, Gordon D. Johndroe, also declined to comment on the report’s conclusions but said: “Everyone understands that the current situation in Afghanistan is a tough one. That’s why the president ordered additional troops there. That’s why we’re increasing the size of the Afghanistan Army.”

Both major presidential candidates, Senators Barack Obama and John McCain, have called for American troop increases in Afghanistan even beyond those the White House has ordered. Mr. Obama has accused the White House of paying too little attention to Afghanistan as it poured the vast bulk of American military resources into the war in Iraq, while Mr. McCain has defended the administration’s decision, saying that Iraq remains the more important front in the battle against terrorism.

In Tuesday’s presidential debate, Mr. Obama said he told Mr. Karzai during a visit to Afghanistan in July that the Afghan leader had “to do better by your people in order for us to gain the popular support that’s necessary.”

“We have to have a government that is responsive to the Afghan people, and frankly it’s just not responsive right now,” Mr. Obama said.

American officials said that intelligence agencies were also working to produce an assessment on Pakistan, and that both were to be completed after next month’s elections. They said the draft findings had already begun to influence the recommendations of the White House-led review of Afghanistan policy, which was scheduled to be completed this month but has now been postponed several weeks.

The administration is considering whether the United States should devote more effort to working directly with tribal leaders in far-flung provinces, and possibly arming tribal militias, to fight the Taliban in places where Afghanistan’s army and police forces have been ineffective.

The Bush administration had long resisted making tribal elders a centerpiece of American strategy in Afghanistan. American officials had hoped instead that strong national institutions like the Afghan Army could protect the Afghan population, but the escalating violence this year has forced a reassessment of the value of the tribal system for counterinsurgency operations.

“In order to have an effective counterinsurgency strategy, you need to have strong local governance in the districts and the provinces,” said a senior State Department official who has been briefed on the report’s broad conclusions, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

In a sign of the seriousness of the administration’s policy review, the White House’s top coordinator for Afghanistan policy, Lt. Gen. Douglas E. Lute of the Army, will lead a team of specialists who will go there to assess the situation, a senior administration official said Wednesday.

Administration officials say the review is examining how and where the nearly $6 billion in annual American assistance to Afghanistan is being spent; how to improve the effectiveness of small teams of American and European civilians and troops seeded throughout the Afghan provinces to spur economic growth; and how to strike the right balance between taking military action against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Pakistan and providing more development aid to that country.

Senior American commanders have recently been blunt in their assessment of the security trends in the country. “In large parts of Afghanistan, we don’t see progress,” Gen. David D. McKiernan, the top American officer in Afghanistan, told reporters last week. “We’re into a very tough counterinsurgency fight and will be for some time.”

It is not just American officials who offer a grim prognosis. A French diplomatic cable leaked to a French newspaper last week quoted the British ambassador to Afghanistan as forecasting that the NATO-led mission there would fail.

“The current situation is bad, the security situation is getting worse, so is corruption, and the government has lost all trust,” the British envoy, Sherard Cowper-Coles, was quoted as telling the French deputy ambassador to Kabul, who wrote the cable.

British officials have said the comments attributed to Sir Sherard were distorted and do not reflect official British policy.

Corruption eats away at Afghan government

DOUG SAUNDERS

From Saturday's Globe and Mail

• E-mail Doug Saunders
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May 3, 2008 at 11:24 PM EDT

KABUL — Among the soldiers, diplomats and aid workers who live in Afghanistan, it is the problem that nobody dares mention.

Among ordinary Afghans, it's a daily presence, the corruption that is rooted deeply in the Western-backed Afghan government and its appointed officials.

When Afghans are forced by uniformed men to pay large sums of cash in order to travel safely on provincial roads, as they are daily, when their colleagues are arrested and beaten in exchange for ransom payments, when they learn that people pay $150,000 for the job of district police chief in parts of Kandahar province, when entire aid shipments or thousands of police salaries are seized for private use, when world-record heroin exports take place under police watch, everyone in Afghanistan knows where to look.

On heavily guarded streets on the edge of every Afghan city and in the centre of Kabul are the large, wedding-cake houses, surrounded by walls and guards and filled with luxury goods, built in a style popularly known as “narcotecture.”

Canadian officials are said to have
pressed Afghan President Hamid Karzai
hard during the past two years to
reduce the power of his brother,
Ahmed Wali Karzai. (Associated Press)

Inside live the senior officials with top roles in Afghanistan's government, some of whom have amassed fortunes of hundreds of millions of dollars. Some are governors of provinces, like Kandahar governor Asadullah Khalid, reported by Canadian diplomats to have committed torture. Some are top cabinet ministers.

Others wield power through family ties to the President. The man considered by many observers to be the most powerful and feared figure in the Afghan south is not the Kandahar governor but rather Ahmed Wali Karzai, appointed by his brother, President Hamid Karzai, to represent Kandahar province in Kabul.

A U.S. government document leaked to ABC News two years ago accused him of being the central figure in the region's vast opium-export market, which produces the majority of the world's opium and heroin. This week, senior U.S. and British officials said in interviews that they believe he enables, and likely profits from, opium shipments across southern Afghanistan to Iran, and prevents opium crops of those who support him from being eradicated. He has repeatedly denied such accusations.

Huge fortunes are being earned by many of these officials, Western sources said. It is customary to charge a 20-per-cent commission on imports or exports brought through their provinces, including opium exports valued at more than $800-million. That means hundreds of millions can be earned each year in a country where many families live on less than a dollar a day.

And there are other avenues for corruption. Last fall, U.S. military officials discovered that in one region of eastern Afghanistan only a third of the 3,300 police officers supposedly serving in the region actually existed; the salaries from the 2,100 “ghost officers” were going straight into the pockets of politicians and senior police figures. This practice is thought to be commonplace across Afghanistan, with as many as 60 to 80 per cent of officers in some districts being “ghosts.”

Indeed, Western-funded programs designed to end corruption can have the opposite effect. British officials said that the governor of Kandahar has used poppy-eradication funds, designed to eliminate the opium-poppy crops of wealthy traffickers at the top of the drug economy, to target his political enemies, usually people who are not on the list for eradication.

“There's a lot of belief among Afghans that when [the West] turns off the taps, it's going to go back to 1989, so these warlords are building war chests, big piles of money for guns, tanks, whatever,” a British official said.

Getting to the bottom of the corruption in Afghanistan is nearly impossible. The country does not have conspiracy or racketeering laws, which would allow prosecutors to investigate them. Nor does it have more than a rudimentary banking system, so that ill-gotten funds are difficult to find. U.S. officials said, however, that some moves are being made in this direction, and some senior officials may soon be placed on no-fly lists.

Western officials are becoming increasingly frustrated with the power of such well-connected strongmen as larger areas of Afghanistan fall under Taliban control and the millions in Western spending produces few signs of a sustainable economy.

When Canadian Foreign Minister Maxime Bernier made the mistake of telling reporters in Kandahar city last month that Canada had been pressuring President Karzai to have Mr. Khalid, the Kandahar governor, removed from office, it represented the tip of an iceberg of diplomatic and political pressure being put on Mr. Karzai by Western governments.

“It's our biggest single problem, bigger than the Taliban, bigger than poverty,” a senior British official said.

Mr. Karzai's close relationship with some warlords and distrusted leaders, possibly including members of his own family, has been a well-known problem since he became President in 2004. But now, as jockeying begins toward a 2009 presidential election and Western officials are increasingly anxious to bring stability to Afghanistan, Mr. Karzai's acquiescence to violent and deeply corrupt men is increasingly considered unsustainable.

“I think there is an issue of corruption in this government, accepted by everybody, to include President Karzai,” General Dan McNeill, the U.S. commander of the NATO coalition fighting in Afghanistan, said in an interview. “Corruption, in my view, is the symptom, the disease is greed, and that works against what we're trying to do here.”

But in the run-up to the election, President Karzai appears increasingly unwilling to take action.

“Unfortunately, the corruption now has reached even the highest-ranking elected officials, and that is becoming a constant problem. … What I see in Afghanistan is a weak and corrupt government, and the Afghan people have to deal with this, not the international community,” said Yunus Quanooni, the Speaker of Afghanistan's parliament and a potential presidential challenger. “The President sees them as an instrument for re-election himself, so he doesn't dare touch them.”

And when he does touch them, it can be in unhelpful ways.

Last summer, Haji Zahir, the commander of the Nangarhar province border police, was caught shipping 123.5-kilograms of heroin across the Pakistani border. He was removed from his post, but never charged.

In March, after years of international pressure, Mr. Karzai ousted Asadullah Wafa from his job as governor of Helmand province amid allegations that he had profited from that province's enormous opium exports and enabled large-scale organized crime. Mr. Wafa had expelled two British officials from the province after they had launched a program to get Taliban leaders to surrender. After being fired, Mr. Wafa was promptly appointed last month to a new position: head of the complaints department in the national-security branch of Mr. Karzai's office.

Indeed, the current pressure by Canadian and other officials to remove the Kandahar governor from office seems almost identical to a similar campaign, begun five years ago, to get his predecessor, the former mujahedeen fighter Gul Agha Sherzai, removed from the same office.

Mr. Sherzai had admitted to receiving $1-million a week from his share of import duties and from the opium trade, and was considered violent and dangerous.

He was immediately made governor of U.S.-led Nangarhar province in the east, where U.S. officials say he has been a useful ally in ending opium-poppy production and establishing law and order. U.S. officials said that they believe he has a net worth of $300-million from his time running Kandahar, but that his level of corruption is fairly minor now. Nevertheless, they hope to see him gone some day.

“I think you're going to see less and less of the Sherzai-type figure; he's a transitional type,” said Alison Blosser, an official with the U.S. State Department involved with provincial reconstruction in Nangarhar.

Indeed, many of the current corruption problems date back to the early months of the Afghan war, in 2001, when U.S. Army Special Forces and CIA agents gave millions of dollars to regional fighters such as Mr. Sherzai to battle the Taliban, and then, after the Taliban had been ousted, allowed them to become the de facto government.

They displaced both the traditional system of tribal elders and the emerging national government. Mr. Karzai relied on them to extend his influence beyond his family's own tribe.

Despite their alarm at some of these developments, officials from the United States, Britain and Canada all say they are maintaining their support for Mr. Karzai. This is partly because they see no viable alternative. None of the dozen-odd prospective presidential challengers seem strong enough to hold the country together.

And it is also because, certainly in the case of Canadian officials, they believe that some progress is being made toward installing non-criminal leadership in key branches of the government, even if it's happening slowly.

Much of the Canadians' faith is in the newly created Independent Directorate of Local Governance, or the IDLG, which was created by Mr. Karzai to oversee the appointment of regional and state leaders.

Since it was created last August, the IDLG has fired the governors of eight of Afghanistan's 34 provinces. And in an interview at his Kabul office, IDLG head Barna Karim, who is widely respected by Western and Afghan leaders, said that he hopes to see at least six more governors replaced in the near future.

But his office only has the authority to recommend changes to Mr. Karzai, and the President has lately seemed less interested in ousting officials, perhaps because of the looming election.

“We just have to curb them as much as we can, slowly and surely,” Mr. Karim said. “In those provinces where we changed governors, it wasn't easy.”

And some officials are still considered untouchable. Ahmed Wali Karzai, the President's brother in Kandahar, is said to be beyond the reach of any government body.

Zarar Ahmad Moqbel, the Interior Minister, said in an interview that he does not consider the Karzais to be appropriate subjects of investigation. “The President of Afghanistan has sent an official decree to all the offices of the Afghan government, stating that we should not spare any members of his family from investigation,” he said, adding that he therefore did not consider it necessary to look into any such allegations.

Canadian officials are said to have pressed President Karzai hard during the past two years to reduce the power of his brother and of Mr. Khalid.

But they have backed off recently, in the wake of Mr. Bernier's unguarded remarks and because they are said to believe that such efforts could be counterproductive.

Many observers believe that President Karzai will try to keep loyalists in office, regardless of their problems or ties to criminal activity, until next year's presidential race is settled. He has not yet declared himself a candidate for re-election.

Gen. McNeill, the U.S. commander of the NATO coalition, likened Mr. Karzai's position to that of a second-tier soccer club with a weak bench.

He noted that the vast majority of Afghans are illiterate, after enduring almost 30 years without functioning schools. The country has just produced its first batch of university graduates this year. In the view of officials such as Gen. McNeill, the hard men may have to remain in office for a while.

“If a government [such as Canada's], which has a vested interest in a particular province, goes to President Karzai, and says, ‘This particular governor does not seem to be the person who has the skills to take this thing forward,' and President Karzai turns to his bench, and what do you think he sees? It's a tough business. … I think it's in that line of effort that we have our slowest rate of progress. We think we're helping, but it's just a tough business.”

Karzai's brother angrily denies drug connections

GRAEME SMITH

From Tuesday's Globe and Mail

October 7, 2008 at 1:21 AM EDT

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of Afghanistan's president and the most powerful politician in the country's violent southern region, says the United States has tried to push him into exile over allegations of drug dealing.

Reacting angrily to an article in this weekend's New York Times about his alleged links to the opium trade, Mr. Karzai summoned journalists to his heavily fortified house in Kandahar yesterday. As he has frequently in the past, he denied any connection to drug deals but he also described feeling pressure in a meeting with Ronald Neumann, who served as U.S. ambassador to Kabul from 2005 to 2007.

“He told me this is not a legal issue, this is a political issue, [but] people are accusing you, and it's damaging the President's reputation,” Mr. Karzai said. “He suggested that I should go and become an ambassador somewhere. I told him … I cannot. I want to stay in my country, I want to serve my people. So I didn't accept this proposal.”

Mr. Karzai was speaking in English; he gave an almost identical account in his native Pashto language, elaborating that his elder half-brother President Hamid Karzai supported his refusal to leave and asked him to return to Kandahar.

Ahmed Wali Karzai, brother of Afghan
President Hamid Karzai, speaks during
a press conference in the city of
Kandahar, south of Kabul, Afghanistan
on Monday Oct. 6, 2008.
(Allauddin Khan/Associated Press)

Western security officials have privately said they would like to see Mr. Karzai removed from Kandahar, where he serves as chairman of the provincial council. But no U.S. or Canadian officials have ever publicly expressed doubt about their influential ally.

Behind closed doors, questions have been growing about the Karzai family's business dealings. During a private meeting at the Canadian embassy this summer, current U.S. ambassador William Wood accused Kandahar's political leadership of involvement with opium, provoking a stormy response from the younger Mr. Karzai. (The Canadian ambassador stayed out of the debate, by all accounts.) Mr. Karzai's reaction was no less emphatic after the latest accusations published on Saturday. The New York Times cited documents obtained from U.S. investigators and interviews with senior officials linking Mr. Karzai with two shipments of heroin worth millions of dollars.

But an informant quoted in the story denied speaking with the U.S. newspaper when contacted by Afghan authorities on Sunday, Mr. Karzai said, and another source named in the story, parliamentarian Habibullah Jan, is dead.

In fact, Mr. Karzai himself was initially among those named by Mr. Jan's family as possibly linked to the gunmen who shot him outside his house in early July, but the killing was later blamed on the Taliban. The bitter rivalry between Mr. Jan and Mr. Karzai was widely known in Kandahar, as the two had supported opposing candidates in the presidential election. Several months before his death, Mr. Jan became one of the few politicians in the country to publicly accuse Mr. Karzai of running a drug operation.

But Mr. Karzai described the rivalry as a reason to doubt Mr. Jan's accusation. The New York Times said Mr. Karzai spoke by telephone with Mr. Jan in 2004 and ordered him to release a truckload of heroin Mr. Jan had captured, but yesterday Mr. Karzai scoffed at the idea that he could have given such an order to his political enemy.

“All these accusations are politically motivated and I am the victim of vicious politics,” Mr. Karzai said.

Those are phrases Mr. Karzai has often repeated in recent years, challenging anybody to show proof of the widespread rumours about his business connections. But the latest report left him visibly more agitated than usual, his right leg shaking rapidly as he denounced the charges.

“I've been accused of being a drug dealer for the last five or six years,” he said. “It's just a rumour. Nobody is able to prove it. So it's like a ghost. … You cannot see it, you cannot touch it, you cannot hear it, but it's there.”

Mr. Karzai said he has asked for, and received, letters from Afghanistan's Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Counter-Narcotics certifying that they have no evidence connecting him with drugs. He asked for a similar letter from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration but got no reply, he added.

He suggested that the leaks in a U.S. newspaper are retribution against President Karzai for speaking out against civilian casualties inflicted by U.S. bombings.

“I'm sort of like a punching bag for the President,” he said. “Whenever someone is not happy with the President they come to punch me.”

Speaking with unusual passion, he staked his own life on his denials.

“I am ready to swear on God's name, on my children's name, that I never in my life, I never had anything to do with any kind of drugs in my life,” he said. “Not in the past, not now, I will not do anything in the future. Never. If anybody can come and they can prove, then they can hang me in Kandahar city.”