The U.S. efforts to pacify the violence in Afghanistan might want to start with the government officials themselves. Afghan Finance Minister Omar Zakhilwal allegedly threatened to cut Shakib Noori, Afghan’s commercial attaché at the Afghan Embassy in Washington, “into pieces.” The proposed Shakib Shish Kebab was never prepared, though it was detailed in an email sent on April 28, 2012 and carbon copied to various other officials. Noori says in emails that he believes that this is not mere hyperbole, but a real threat. It turns out that the law firm Holland & Knight is featured prominently in the controversy.
Zakhilwal is a close association and member of the cabinet of President Hamid Karzai.
Noori wrote in an email that “You called me from your Dubai phone number (971*********) on April 26, 2012 at 4:13PM (Washington DC Time) threatening my life, you said; you will cut me into pieces. You said; you will tear me apart. You said; you will kill me in Afghanistan. You said; you will kill my family. You’ve cursed my father and my mother. You used the most disgusting words ever. I have clearly recorded your voice. A copy of that will be sent to everyone so that they know your “real” character and personality. I will make sure – a copy of your recorded voice reaches to H.E. President Hamid Karzai.” Noori wrote “The way you yelled at me on the phone. You seemed a person that could be a serious threat to our life.”
It appears that the dispute began with a dinner at Cafe Milano where Omar Zakhilwal was taken out by a female Iranian lawyer based in Kabul who was sent to resolve a contracting firm DynCorp’s “tax dispute” with an Afghan company. They were seated next to an Afghan delegation with Noori and three other Afghan officials. There appears to be some question of why Omar Zakhilwal was meeting with the woman and Afghan gossip sites have suggested that the Holland & Knight lawyer was offering more than good advocacy. He insists that “For your information, our dinner conversation in the restaurant was focused on DynCorp’s tax dispute.” There have been allegations that he had been given a bribe and that he was in an improper relationship with the lawyer. Corruption is widespread in the Karzai government and Zakhilwal has been specifically cited as the recipient of millions of bribes and gifts. In his response, Noori refers to the “so-called business dinner.”
The involvement of Holland & Knight raise some interesting possible problems. There is the potential criminal liability for an alleged bribe. It is not clear if the lawyer is a D.C. bar member, but the firm itself could be subject to an ethics complaint. However, it is not clear who would demand such an investigation. The Obama Administration, like the Bush Administration, has largely turned a blind eye to Karzai and his cronies stealing hundreds of millions of dollars. The Administration is unlikely to start enforcing federal law and policies on corruption at this late date.
Source: Buzz Feed
Read Kite Runner.
The Afghan Embassy has diplomatic immunity, but everything has its limits. Give Shakib Noori and those who are also threatened to be cut up sanctuary.
You want to talk about a tax dispute? Everyone knows the Afghan regime is corrupt.
Get out of Afghanistan. Let the Russians have it again. Forget about enforcing federal law and policies in places like that. It isn’t going to happen.
With potentially millions of dollars in bribes at stake I’d be taking the threats seriously too!
No, I don’t think you can be too cynical about the level of corruption in Afghan politics, or American politics.
Let the Russians have it. Just keep the stinger’s away, and the Russians can do it. No doubt about it.
“The U.S. efforts to pacify the violence in Afghanistan might want to start with the government officials themselves.” — Jonathan Turley
“The fighting is going on in four fronts: the government versus the generals, the Buddhists versus the government, the generals versus the ambassador, and, I hope, the generals versus the VC.” — General [and later, Ambassador] Maxwell Taylor to a dozen American correspondents in Saigon, 1965
Americans pacifying petty rivalries with mega-violence while fighting corruption by corrupting everything they touch, all to prevent a hypothetical future war by having a real war now. As Daniel Ellsberg said of the American officials who keep concocting these absurd imperial misadventures : “They’re not actually insane. They’re just clever people who have lost their minds.”
Clever people who have lost their minds aren’t clever. They just have big bags of money.
Do you know who defeated the Russians in the 1800′s?
An american who was hired by the king to make and lead an army. He came home with cash and a few camels who he planned to exploit. Didn’t work.
Nobody has defeated the Afghans, not even themselves. Alexander the Great, after venturing north into Central Asia, took the sea route to the Indus valley.
So they’ve been successfully defending themselves long before Mohammed. The latest Russian thingy was due to strict control of their puppets. And CIA Stingers did a more effective job than we are now.
All of this being equally tenuous as the post itself re eventual penalties for an American law firm delivering bribes. What’s the issue? If they don’t hand it over, their agents will.
Here we are swatting at gnats and meanwhile….
The MIC is having high level discussions on levels of profits, compensation for services rendered by generals, diplomats, and various other agencies servicing the MIC and the defence industries. And whose money are they
dividing? Need I say?
The United States does have bribery laws regarding dealings in foreign countries. But are the bribery laws enforced?
Making Dependence Pay
“Cynicism about the war and a lapse into increasing passivity was the result [of shutting China out of top-level alliance decision-making]. An attitude of “Let the Allies do it” prevailed in the teahouses of Chunking after the fall of Burma. To use barbarians to fight other barbarians was a traditional principle of Chinese statecraft which now more than ever appeared not only advisable but justified. Chinese opinion, according to a foreign resident, held that not only was China justified in remaining passive after five years of resistance; “it was her right to get as much as possible from her allies while they fought.” The exercise of this right became the Government’s chief war effort. The long endeavor to shake off the foreigners and emerge from dependence had not succeeded; China’s problems had been too great. With dwindling capacity to cope with its own circumstances, the Kuomintang [client] applied all its energy to making dependence pay” [emphasis added].” — Barbara Tuchman, Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-1945
An old story with American military intervention in foreign civil wars — one still playing out with dreary regularity today. As our bad-puppet vassals see things: Use Americans to control other Americans and Make Dependence Pay, from China to Korea to Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan to [whatever impoverished backwater "threatens" America next]. How can any country that calls itself “modern” and “a democracy” let this mindless shit go on for even one more day?
I once took some graduate classes in Buddhism from a former Sri Lankan ambassador to France and the United States. During a conversation over lunch, he told me of his first day in Washington, D.C., when a lobbyist intermediary for a U. S. congressman met him at the airport upon his arrival. The lobbyist intermediary drove the new ambassador to an expensive restaurant where he finally got around to making the 35-to 1 pitch: namely, that for every one million dollars the ambassador’s country contributed to the Congressman, the Congressman would see to it that the ambassador’s country received thirty-five million dollars of aid. When it got down to the details, it turned out that the Congressman wanted money to support his mistress and the ambassador had to beg off agreeing to that until he had consulted with his government, which declined to give its assent. Not long afterwards, the ambassador said, he had occasion to meet with Pakistan’s ambassador to the U. S. (a woman) who told him that she had received exactly the same proposal from the same lobbyist intermediary for the same Congressman. “You find corruption everywhere,” the ambassador told me,” but the sheer scale of it in America defies the human mind to comprehend it.”
Mehrnoosh Aryanpour is the name of the women involved in this case!
If you read the book Kite Runner, there is a phrase where an Afghan says, “even the flies are busy in America.” Do you know that the United States spends more money on the military than every other nation on the planet combined?
“The Obama Administration, like the Bush Administration, has largely turned a blind eye to Karzai and his cronies stealing hundreds of millions of dollars. The Administration is unlikely to start enforcing federal law and policies on corruption at this late date.” — Jonathan Turley
The Obama Administration, like the Bush Administration, does not enforce federal law when elite members of the global corporate oligarchy violate it. They simply order up new ex-post-facto laws from the Congress and the Courts so as to make legal — retroactively-and-henceforth — whatever crimes the corporate oligarchs have gotten caught transgressing. Law enforcement applies only — and harshly — to the proles.
Hamid Karzai worked as a consultant for an international oil company before Deputy Dubya Bush made him President of Afghanistan. Dubya didn’t appoint him and Obama hasn’t kept him because either president cared or cares what he does or thinks or how much money he steals, as long as he doesn’t split to go join his money in Dubai before the American military and associated mercenaries beat him to the exits. How all this reminds me of my own desultory time in the Nixon-Kissinger Fig Leaf Contingent 40 years ago. Hard to save face when it looks so much like an uncovered ass.
“When our Beltway Masters were caught illegally wiretapping before 2008, they simply drafted a new law to legalize it. What’s more, this decree was retroactively applied to private communication firms such as Verizon, ATT, Sprint and T Mobile, to prevent them from being sued. In a Fascist state, the government always defends and bails out the fattest corporations.” — Linh Dinh, “Strip Your Rights,” Counterpunch (Weekend Edition May 25-27, 2012 )
So what reason could the Fascist Corpporation of America possibly have for disciplining one of its own wholly-owned Afghan subsidiaries for doing nothing more than learning from corporate headquarters and dining sumptuously and visibly at one of its favorite neighborhood restaurants?
This petty corruption among the elite corporate courtesans in Washington reminds me of House Republican Congressman Robert Livingston, who had to give up the Speakership — moments after accepting it — because Hustler publisher Larry Flynt threatened to broadcast details of Livingston’s illicit affair with a corporate lobbyist having business before his Congressional committee. The embittered Livingston called Flynt “a bottom feeder,” to which Flynt replied: “Sure, I’m a bottom feeder. But look what I found when I got down there.”
Americans could only hope to have a government as corrupt as that which misgoverns Afghanistan at the direction of the United States. Hundreds of millions of dollars in graft would seem like a bargain.
Not like it hasn’t happened before…. Nah…. We use bullets……just ask Vincent Foster….oh you can’t, he’s dead….
What about the massive amounts of cash distributed in Iraq with no accountability? Isn’t that the way Saddam used to do it?