Big Surprise, Eh?

The CIA has been paying off Ahmed Wali Karzai for years. He the brother of President Karzai and is an alleged kingpin in the Afghan heroin trade.

I suppose the CIA does some good work. An argument could be made that their successes are largely secret. But sometimes it seems that when there is a really serious foreign policy screwup, where the reverberations last for decades, you can find the CIA's fingerprints all over it.

Update: Abu Muqawama's take on this:

Again, I am not in a position to confirm or deny that the CIA has an enduring relationship with AWK, and I am telling the truth when I tell you that all I "know" about this is what I read in the open source world. But you can be darn sure that if we think that AWK is the CIA's guy, the Afghans most certainly believe that to be the case.

Abu Muqawama calls the article in the NY Times "the most important article on Afghanistan you'll read this week."