Page 1 of 2 Afghanistan runs on well-oiled wheels
By Pratap Chatterjee
KABUL - Every morning, dozens of trucks laden with diesel from Turkmenistan
lumber out of the northern Afghan border town of Hairaton on a two-day trek
across the Hindu Kush down to Afghanistan's capital, Kabul. Among the dozens of
businesses dispatching these trucks are two extremely well connected companies
- Ghazanfar and Zahid Walid - that helped to swell the election coffers of
President Hamid Karzai as well as the family business of his running mate, the
country's new vice president - and warlord - Mohammed Qasim Fahim.
Some of the trucks are on their way to two power stations in the northern part
of the capital: a recently refurbished, if inefficient, plant that has served
Kabul for a little more than a quarter of a century, and a facility scheduled
for completion next year and
built with money from the US Agency for International Development (USAID).
Afghan political analysts observe that Ghazanfar and Zahid Walid are striking
examples of the multimillion-dollar business conglomerates, financed by
American as well as Afghan tax dollars and connected to powerful political
figures, which have, since the fall of the Taliban in 2001, emerged as part of
a pervasive culture of corruption here.
Nasrullah Stanikzai, a professor of law and political science at Kabul
University, says of the companies in the pocket of the vice president:
"Everybody knows who is Ghazanfar. Everybody knows who is Zahid Walid. The
[government elite] directly or indirectly have companies, licenses and sign
contracts. But corruption is not confined just to the Afghans. The
international community bears a share of this blame."
Indeed, the tale of the "reconstruction" of Kabul's electricity supply is a
classic story of how foreign aid has often served to line the pockets of both
international contractors from the donor countries and the local political
elite. Unfortunately, these aid-financed projects also generally fail - as the
Kabul diesel plants appear destined to - because of a lack of planning and the
hard cash to keep them operating.
The rise of a powerbroker
Abdul Hasin and his brother, the vice president, offer a perfect examples of
the new business elite. The two men are half-brothers, born to the two wives of
a respected religious cleric from Marz, a village in the Panjshir Valley, north
of Kabul.
In the early 1980s, Fahim, the older brother, joined the mujahideen forces of
Ahmad Shah Massoud in the struggle against the Soviet occupation of
Afghanistan. In 1992, three years after the Soviet army withdrew in defeat,
Fahim was appointed head of intelligence in Afghanistan by the new president,
Burhanuddin Rabbani, in the midst of a fierce and destructive civil war among
the victors.
When the Taliban took control of the country a few years later, Fahim became
the intelligence chief for the Northern Alliance, also led by Massoud, which
controlled less than a third of the country. On September 9, 2001, two days
before the World Trade Center was attacked, Massoud was assassinated by
al-Qaeda operatives and Fahim took control of the Northern Alliance, which the
US would soon finance and support in its "invasion" of Afghanistan.
A number of popular accounts of that invasion, such as Bob Woodward's book Bush
at War, suggest that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) directly
gave Northern Alliance warlords like Fahim millions of dollars in cold, hard
cash to help fight the Taliban in the runup to the US invasion. "I can take
Kabul, I can take Kunduz, if you break the [Taliban front] line for me. My guys
are ready," Woodward quotes Fahim telling a CIA agent named Gary after
pocketing a million dollars in $100 bills.
Once the Taliban were defeated, Fahim was invited to become vice president in
the transitional government led by Karzai, a position he held for two years. It
was at this juncture that Fahim's brothers, notably Abdul Hasin, started to
build a business empire - and not long after, good fortune began to rain down
on the family in the form of lucrative "reconstruction" contracts.
In January 2002, while Fahim took whirlwind tours of Washington and London,
meeting General Tommy Franks, who had commanded US forces during the invasion,
and taking the salute from the Coldstream Guards, his younger brother was
putting together a business plan. Soon thereafter, Zahid Walid, a company named
after Abdul Hasin's older sons, not so surprisingly won a series of lucrative
contracts to pour concrete for a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) base
as well as portions of the US Embassy being rebuilt in Kabul and the city's
airport, which was in a state of disrepair.
On a plot of land in downtown Kabul reportedly "seized" for a song by Fahim,
Abdul Hasin also financed the construction of a high-rise building dubbed
"Goldpoint", which now houses dozens of jewelry shops. Soon, the company was
importing Russian gas, and not long after that, Abdul Hasin set up the Gas
Group, a company that ran a plant in the industrial suburb of Tarakhil that
marketed bottled gas to households and small businesses.
In the winter of 2006, Zahid Walid won a $12 million contract from the Afghan
Ministry of Energy and Water to supply fuel to the old diesel plant in
northwest Kabul, according to data published on the website of the government's
central procurement agency, Afghanistan Reconstruction and Development
Services. In the summer of 2007, the company won another $40 million
diesel-supply contract, and last winter it took on a third contract worth $22
million.
On October 19, I visited Zahid Walid's heavily guarded headquarters in the
wealthy Kabul neighborhood of Wazir Akbar Khan, not far from the even more
heavily fortified US Embassy. There, Ramin Seddiqui, the managing director of
the company's diesel-import business, filled me in on another exclusive
contract the company had secured from the Afghan government only days before
for an additional $17 million. Zahid Walid is now to supply diesel fuel to the
new 100 megawatt diesel power plant being built by Black & Veatch, a Kansas
construction company, with money from USAID.
Most senior Afghan government officials and political figures are loath to
discuss how Zahid Walid has won all these contracts - at least publicly. On a
recent visit to the Ministry of Commerce, I asked Noor Mohammed Wafa, the
general director of oil products and liquid gas, about them. He promptly
claimed that he had never even heard of the company. He then shot a glance at
my Afghan assistant and said in Dari, "That's Marshal Fahim's company, isn't
it?" When I asked whether the rules were different for powerful political
figures - as everyone in Kabul knows is the case - Wafa politely denied any
suggestion of favoritism in the awarding of import licenses.
In fact, dozens of people assured me in private on my most recent visit to
Kabul that favoritism and corruption were the essence of the Karzai government
the US has helped "reconstruct" over the past eight years.
A white elephant power plant
While Zahid Walid has won close to $100 million in diesel contracts from the
Afghan government in these years, there is hard evidence that the money for
this once-needed fuel is now essentially being squandered. Earlier this year,
KEC, an Indian company, completed the first of two high voltage powerlines from
neighboring Central Asian countries that will bring cheap and reliable
electricity into the capital.
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In the early 1980s, Fahim, the older brother, joined the mujahideen forces of
Ahmad Shah Massoud in the struggle against the Soviet occupation of
Afghanistan. In 1992, three years after the Soviet army withdrew in defeat,
Fahim was appointed head of intelligence in Afghanistan by the new president,
Burhanuddin Rabbani, in the midst of a fierce and destructive civil war among
the victors.
