Aboard The Democracy Train

WASHINGTON — With the end in sight for Hamid Karzai’s days in office as Afghanistan’s president, members of his family are trying to protect their status, weighing how to hold on to power while secretly fighting among themselves for control of the fortune they have amassed in the last decade.

One brother, Qayum Karzai, is mulling a run for the presidency when his brother steps down in 2014. Other brothers have been battling over the crown jewel in the family empire — the largest private residential development in Afghanistan. The conflict over the project, known as Aino Mena, has provoked accusations of theft and extortion, even reports of an assassination plot.

“It’s family,” Qayum Karzai said. “They get upset, and over time they get over it. I hope they get over it.”

One Karzai brother is also said to have imprisoned a longtime Karzai aide in an effort to make him disclose the whereabouts of money and assets that relatives suspect were hidden by Ahmed Wali Karzai, another of President Karzai’s brothers and the political boss of southern Afghanistan who was assassinated last year. He was often accused of benefiting from the Afghan opium trade and an array of corrupt deals, though he denied such claims.

The looming withdrawal of American and NATO troops by 2014 from the still unresolved war, along with President Karzai’s coming exit, is causing anxiety among the Afghan elite who have been among the war’s biggest beneficiaries, enriching themselves from American military contracts, insider business deals with foreign companies, government corruption and narcotics trafficking.

“If you are one of the Afghan oligarchs, where you put your money and where you live is an open question now,” Seth Jones, an analyst at the RAND Corporation, said. “That means you are thinking about moving your money and finding a backup option about where to live.”

The president’s family — many of whom are American citizens who returned to Afghanistan after an American-led coalition toppled the Taliban in 2001 and brought Mr. Karzai to power — are among those who have prospered the most, by the accounts of many Afghan businessmen and government insiders.

Several political observers in Kabul said any candidacy by Qayum Karzai, a longtime Maryland resident who has served in the Afghan Parliament, would be a long shot because of the nation’s fatigue with Hamid Karzai and widespread resentment over the rampant corruption that has tainted his government.

Even some of the Karzai family’s own business partners are among the critics.

“We have an illegitimate and irresponsible government because of Karzai and his family,” said Abdullah Nadi, an Afghan-American developer from Virginia who is a partner in the Aino Mena housing development, but who is trying to get out of the venture.

While exploiting their opportunities in Afghanistan, the extended Karzai family has for years simmered with tensions, jealousies, business rivalries, blood feuds and even accusations of murder. With the often-fractious family, it can be difficult to discern the truth, but everyone agrees that the conflict over control of its empire can be traced back to the death in July 2011 of Ahmed Wali Karzai, who had risen from working as a waiter in Chicago to become one of the most powerful men in Afghanistan, serving as the chairman of the Kandahar Provincial Council.

His murder, by an Afghan thought to be a loyal supporter, left a power vacuum in Kandahar — and in the Karzai family.

President Karzai appointed another brother, Shah Wali Karzai, to take on their slain brother’s role as head of the Populzai, the Karzai’s family tribe.

No one expected much from him. Quiet and reserved, he was largely overshadowed by Ahmed Wali Karzai, and even lived in his more powerful brother’s compound in Kandahar.

But Shah Wali Karzai has been transformed in the past year. In addition to his role as tribal chief, he serves as project manager of Aino Mena, the sprawling residential development on the outskirts of Kandahar being developed by AFCO, a corporation owned by another brother, Mahmoud Karzai, and his four partners.

They have built 3,000 homes, with plans for a total of 14,700. The developers are building on 10,000 acres, land that Afghan military officials have claimed was illegally seized from the Ministry of Defense.

Emboldened after Ahmed Wali Karzai’s death, Shah Wali Karzai appeared no longer satisfied to serve just as an employee at Aino Mena. At some point in the past few months, he created his own corporation in Kandahar and then secretly moved all of the cash from the housing development’s bank accounts to those of his new business.

According to several AFCO partners, Shah Wali Karzai had transferred about $55 million. “He simply opened another company, and put the money in that company,” Mahmoud Karzai said in an interview.

Mr. Nadi, one of the partners in Aino Mena, accused Shah Wali Karzai of forging his signature on documents to make it appear as if he had approved the creation of Shah Wali Karzai’s company as the new corporate parent of Aino Mena. “I had no clue what the hell was going on,” Mr. Nadi said in an interview.

When Mahmoud Karzai discovered what his brother had done, he demanded that Shah Wali return the money. But Shah Wali refused, and instead insisted that he be made a partner in Aino Mena. Mahmoud and his partners refused, and the two sides settled into a bitter stalemate.

Shah Wali Karzai does not deny transferring the money to his corporation. But he justified his actions by saying that he is protecting the money for the sake of the people of Kandahar. He has told others in Kandahar that if he had not taken the money, Mahmoud Karzai could have moved it to secret bank accounts in Dubai. Aino Mena would then have risked failure just like Kabul Bank, another of Mahmoud Karzai’s business ventures, he argued.

Mahmoud Karzai was a key figure in the scandal surrounding the near-collapse of the bank, which was Afghanistan’s largest, in 2010. It lost about $900 million in insider deals, much of which is believed to have ended up in secret bank accounts in Dubai. Last year, a federal grand jury in New York began a criminal investigation into Mahmoud Karzai’s business activities in Afghanistan, pursuing accusations of tax evasion, racketeering and extortion. No charges have been brought against Mahmoud Karzai, who is a United States citizen.

“The money belongs to the people of Kandahar,” Shah Wali Karzai said in a statement in response to questions about transferring the housing development funds. “They paid much of that money for the infrastructure at Aino Mena.”

He added, “When I became project manager, they owed money to the bank and local contractors, and all the money was paid off as I turned around that company from an almost bankrupt one to a successful one.”

Mahmoud Karzai said he and his partners have filed complaints with the Afghan attorney general, accusing Shah Wali Karzai of stealing their money and using extortion to gain a partnership stake in Aino Mena. The attorney general has refused to move against Shah Wali Karzai, apparently unwilling to get involved in what he sees as a family battle.

Qayum Karzai said he attempted to negotiate a settlement, but has backed off. “Tempers were flaring up,” he said in an interview. “I tried to mediate, but I failed.”

President Karzai has been reluctant to take sides in the family dispute, though his government has been drawn into the matter. The Afghan Central Bank has finally intervened, freezing the bank accounts of Shah Wali Karzai’s company. Mahmoud Karzai said a deal was in the works, but other partners said the dispute had not been resolved.

In the midst of the conflict, Afghan security officials uncovered a plot to kill Mahmoud Karzai. About two months ago, the National Directorate of Security, the Afghan domestic intelligence agency, identified at least three Afghans, including two former employees of the Aino Mena development, who had been involved in a plot to kill Mahmoud Karzai and possibly others. One man was arrested and later released. The two former Aino Mena employees implicated in the plot had both been fired by Mahmoud Karzai.

Afghan security officials have not accused Shah Wali Karzai of any involvement in the scheme. He denies any involvement in it, and Mahmoud Karzai said in an interview, “I refuse to believe that my brother had anything to do with it.”

Family members said that Shah Wali Karzai had also been trying to unlock the secrets of his dead brother’s fortune.

After Ahmed Wali Karzai was killed, his most trusted aide, Zamarai — like many Afghans, he uses only one name — moved to Dubai. Reports of his lavish lifestyle there fed suspicions within the family that Zamarai had access to riches hidden by Ahmed Wali Karzai, perhaps through accounts and properties that had been placed in Zamarai’s name.

When Zamarai returned recently to Kandahar — some family members claim he was lured back by Aziz Karzai, Afghanistan’s ambassador to Russia and President Karzai’s uncle, an account the envoy flatly denies — he was detained by security personnel working for Shah Wali Karzai, according to relatives.

Mahmoud Karzai says he believes that Zamarai knows the whereabouts of “one or two million dollars.” Others familiar with the matter say that Shah Wali Karzai suspects that Zamarai knows about hundreds of millions of dollars more hidden in Dubai and elsewhere, including assets in Afghan businesses and real estate.

Zamarai is being held at Sarposa Prison in Kandahar, where he is guarded by Shah Wali Karzai’s security personnel rather than the regular prison guards, according to several people familiar with the matter but who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution from the Karzai family.

He has not been charged with any crime.

When asked through Gerald Posner, a Karzai family lawyer, about Zamarai and whether he is holding him, Shah Wali Karzai declined to comment.

After five months of politically charged hearings that centered on the former diplomat, Husain Haqqani, the commission submitted its findings to the Supreme Court on Tuesday. The court then issued an order for Mr. Haqqani, to return to Pakistan from the United States, where he is teaching at Boston University. Legal experts said Mr. Haqqani could face treason charges.

The commission’s findings, in what has become known here as the “Memogate” scandal, are likely to reignite long-running tensions between Pakistan’s top civilian leaders and army generals that only last January led to rumors of a possible military coup. And it is certain to lead to more trouble for President Asif Ali Zardari, who is seen as close to Mr. Haqqani. Mr. Zardari is already engaged in several legal battles of his own with the court and stands accused of ultimately approving the supposed covert approach to the Obama administration.

State media said the commission had determined that Mr. Haqqani was responsible for a secret memo sent in May 2011 to Adm. Mike Mullen, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, seeking American help to avert a possible military takeover in Pakistan.

In the unsigned document, Mr. Haqqani is accused of offering to help make Pakistan’s military leadership more amenable to American priorities in return for President Obama’s assistance in preventing a coup.

Mr. Haqqani, who resigned his post in November, did not testify before the commission. Speaking by phone from the United States, he rejected the commission’s findings as “political and one-sided.”

“I am being hounded for the perception that I was pro-American,” he said. “The inquiry commission is not a court, and those claiming it has determined guilt or innocence are wrong.”

The accusations, which infuriated Pakistan’s military leadership, stemmed from an article published in the Financial Times last October by Mansoor Ijaz, an American businessman of Pakistani origin who claims to have the delivered the unsigned memo to the Pentagon on Mr. Haqqani’s instructions.

Mr. Ijaz’s claims led to Mr. Haqqani’s resignation. The army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, and Gen. Ahmad Shuja Pasha, who was then head of the Pakistani spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, sent affidavits to the Supreme Court expressing alarm at the accusations. Weeks later, following a petition from the opposition leader Nawaz Sharif, the Supreme Court established a three-judge panel to investigate the claims.

The initial hearings, in January, were framed by intense intrigue outside the courtroom. The prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, accused General Kayani and General Pasha of acting “illegally” and “unconstitutionally.” The army hit back with a trenchant statement warning that Mr. Gilani’s words could have “very serious ramifications with potentially grievous consequences” — prompting fevered speculation of a military coup.

Those tensions eventually calmed after a series of meetings between General Kayani and President Zardari, and the Memogate hearings gradually receded from the media spotlight as other crises took prominence.

As the commission hearings dragged on for months, they offered little clarity on either the authorship of the memo or the motivations behind the episode.

Mr. Ijaz refused to come to Pakistan to testify before the commission, citing security threats, instead testifying by video link from London. Controversy briefly flared after it emerged that he had participated in a music video that featured topless women.

Ultimately, though, Mr. Ijaz failed to produce definitive proof in public to back his claims. And Mr. Haqqani did not appear before the commission at all. He insisted that, like Mr. Ijaz, he should be allowed to testify via video link from abroad. But the judges refused his request.

As the hearings wore on, criticism grew in the Pakistani press, where many commentators said the commission was pursuing an openly partisan political agenda that would have been better dealt with in Parliament.

“The memo controversy was artificially manufactured and based on dubious evidence — basically one man’s accusations,” the newspaper Dawn wrote in April. It said that Mr. Ijaz’s accusations had “created a mountain out of a molehill.” Others accused the court of taking a side in long-bubbling arguments between the country’s top generals, politicians and elements of the news media.

The inquiry has become one of several controversies involving the Supreme Court this year. The court has endeared itself to some Pakistanis by taking a robust approach to human rights abuses committed by the military. It has also clashed with the government by pursuing a corruption case that led to Mr. Gilani’s conviction on contempt charges.

Mr. Haqqani said on Tuesday that the commission’s findings were intended to distract attention from recent corruption accusations against the son of Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry.

Mr. Haqqani also offered a veiled attack on the judiciary, which historically has sided with Pakistan’s generals rather than its civilian leaders, saying that he “refuses to let his patriotism be judged by those who had endorsed martial law regimes and had even given the right to military dictators to amend the Constitution.”

Salman Masood contributed reporting

KABUL, June 7: Defence Secretary Leon Panetta said on Thursday the United States was reaching the limits of its patience with Pakistan because of the safe havens the country offered to insurgents in neighbouring Afghanistan.

It was some of the strongest language used by a US official to describe the strained ties between Washington and Islamabad.

Panetta was speaking in the Afghan capital, where he arrived for talks with military leaders amid rising violence in the war against the Taliban and a spate of deadly incidents, including a NATO air strike said to have killed 18 villagers.

“It is difficult to achieve peace in Afghanistan as long as there is safe haven for terrorists in Pakistan,” Panetta, who arrived in Kabul a day after a deadly insurgent bombing, told reporters.

“It is very important for Pakistan to take steps. It is an increasing concern, the issue of safe haven, and we are reaching the limits of our patience.”

Pakistan’s cooperation is considered critical to US efforts to stabilise Afghanistan before most foreign combat troops leave at the end of 2014.