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.
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."