Weakest link: Abdul Jabar Sabet has clung to office thanks to sinister hidden forces

Never one to be accused of moving swiftly, much less decisively, Afghan President Hamid Karzai has finally fired his accident prone Attorney General, Abdul Jabar Sabet.

The bearded, blustery former aide to fugitive warlord and al Qaeda cohort, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Sabet was bizarrely elevated to the AG’s post two years ago with the help of the US and British Embassies in Kabul – and the connivance of controversial strongmen in and around Karzai’s court.

As documented over the past 18 months here at skyreporter in our Afghan Heroin and Afghan Media series of film reports (pls see Recent Stories), Sabet’s repressive outbursts led the embattled president to begin searching for a replacement a year ago.

Last July, Karzai was poised to shunt Sabet from the AG’s post to a provincial governorship, a move that had to be delayed when Sabet angrily resisted, and the president could find no reasonable replacement.

In a new twist to this Keystone Kops melodrama, Sabet claims he’ll stand for president in next year’s elections. Karzai's office has seized upon the move as grounds for firing Sabet, whose candidacy, they say, could "politicize" the AG's office.

Plenty of informed observers stand ready to put an “X” beside Sabet’s name, but hardly in the context the candidate has in mind. For further reference on the man and what he stands for, here’s an excerpt from COVERING UP KARZAI & CO., published in July, 2007 by Policy Options, the monthly publication of Canada’s Institute for Research on Public Policy:

Supporters of one of his (Sabet’s) victims, the respected former chief of border police at Kabul Airport, General Aminullah Amerkhel, don’t mince words:  Sabet, they say, was acting on behalf of Kabul’s leading druglords when he had Amerkhel removed from his post last October.

Circumstantial evidence appears damning. Amerkhel was an accomplished drug-buster: his face had become well known to viewers of Afghanistan’s TV news channels as he and his men nabbed smugglers almost daily. Then, last year, he challenged corruption up the chain of command. He told reporters that too often, he would arrest a courier - kilogram bags of pure heroin in hand - only to see the smuggler released the next day, on orders from above. Since Amerkhel’s suspension by Sabet, arrests have plummeted. Only five traffickers have been collared at the airport in the past six months. Amerkhel regularly racked up five or six per week.

So is Hamid Karzai’s Attorney General really in league with the heroin gangs? It’s a question that should interest the government of Canada for at least two reasons. First, heroin profits help finance the Taliban's war effort. Second, Sabet boasts to friends of enjoying residency in Canada:  his wife and children live in Montreal. Yet officials in Ottawa - at Foreign Affairs, Immigration and the Prime Minister’s Office - have refused since mid-March to confirm the status of President Karzai’s rogue Attorney General.

Sabet’s past is littered with reasons that he should never have gained entry into Canada, particularly due to his long history of association with the black prince of Afghan extremists, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Sabet was a longtime counsellor to Hekmatyar, once the United States' most-favoured anti-Soviet guerrilla leader, but now on their most-wanted list of terrorists. In 1992, Sabet's continuing links with Hekmatyar led to his dismissal from a job at the Voice of America in Washington D.C. He was denied residency in the United States.

Sabet turned next to Canada, immigrating with his family to Montreal in 1999, where he became a familiar face at the downtown mosque, Masjid as-Salam. Sources within Montreal’s Afghan community confirm that Sabet portrayed himself as a simple refugee to gain residency, and that he failed to disclose the previous denial of re-entry into the U.S. Thus he allegedly committed two “material misrepresentations” with regard to Canadian regulations. Sabet is said to have collected welfare until his return to Kabul in 2003, where he picked up a lawyer’s position at the Interior Ministry.

Then, in an ironic twist typical of U.S. policy in Afghanistan, Sabet used his smooth command of English to form a relationship with a U.S. Justice Department adviser who was seeking favourable reviews of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. As a result, Sabet led an Afghan government inspection of the site, declaring afterward that there were "only one or two" complaints from prisoners, and that "conditions of the jail were humane. The rumours about prison conditions were all wrong."

Soon after, both the U.S. and British embassies in Kabul began lobbying for Mr. Sabet's promotion, according to an aide of President Karzai's who witnessed the sessions. Mr. Sabet was nominated as attorney general just months later. How that nomination was approved by parliament says much about the power structure in Kabul. In order to insure enough votes for Sabet, a deal was brokered by Karzai’s aides between the candidate and a key Karzai ally, Abdul Sayyaf. This brigand is one of Afghanistan’s most feared warlords, a leading force of disunity among the militias that devastated Kabul in the civil war of the early 1990’s. Today, Sayyaf’s an MP - and leader of the parliamentary minority.

In return for Sabet lending support to the controversial amnesty bill that Sayyaf and other accused war criminals pushed through the house earlier this year, the nominee secured his confirmation as Attorney General. Since then, Sayyaf’s hold over Sabet has strengthened.

Sayyaf is frequently accused of land grabbing by citizens of villages to the west and north of the capital. A British lawyer happened to be in Sabet’s office when one such dispute came forward. A grieving widow alleged that her home had been occupied by one of Sayyaf’s militia commanders. The Attorney General listened for a time, then leaned across his desk and yanked the letter of complaint from the widow’s hands. He tore it up and ordered her to leave.

According to a senior Justice Ministry source, most if not all of Sabet’s key staff appointments have been cleared through Sayyaf, particularly that of his deputy of narcotics affairs, General Stanakzai. This left Sayyaf with two trusted henchmen in key counter-narcotics posts:  earlier, he had used his influence to place a close aide named Sadat in the Interior Ministry’s hierarchy.

Sabet, meanwhile, has been equally determined to succeed in the game of connections. Just days after securing the Attorney General’s chair, he elevated a minor police officer named Nadir Hamidi to the rank of full general and made him his deputy. Within weeks, Gen. Nadir - known widely as “Choor,” or briber - fled Afghanistan to Dubai, his pockets stuffed with several hundred thousand dollars of state funds.

Sabet ducked accusations that he’d helped Nadir escape. Then he made an even more disruptive appointment. General Kasim is a former security chief of Baghlan province, north of Kabul. A Hekmatyar loyalist like Sabet, he was facing corruption charges – until the Attorney General had his file wiped clean and installed him as chief of Kabul’s District Ten police station.

There, he’s been a useful tool for Sabet’s barnstorming “anti-vice” raids on foreign-owned Kabul restaurants. (In one incident in February, Kasim’s men helped themselves to seized alcohol, according to foreign aid workers who witnessed the raid. An hour later, one of the expats was stopped at a checkpoint and beaten by policemen “whose breath reeked of vodka.” He filed a complaint, which now languishes at the Interior Ministry.)

More spectacularly, Kasim and his men have been the Attorney General’s storm troopers in putting the squeeze on Kabul’s vibrant young news media. On April 17th, enraged by the coverage of one of his speeches by Tolo TV, Afghanistan’s most popular independent channel, Sabet ordered Kasim and more than a hundred armed policemen to bring the errant journalists to his office. The police stormed Tolo TV’s studios, arresting seven journalists, including four from other agencies covering the raid. Several of the reporters were rifle-butted and punched.

All of this occurred without warrants, as in the Amerkhel case. Saad Mohseni, Tolo TV’s director, protested:  "Sabet has shown that he is totally unfit to hold his position. Our international allies must tell the president this type of official is not acceptable to the Afghan people."

The U.N. agreed, denouncing the raid as “unlawful.” But from the U.S. and its NATO allies, including Canada, there has been only silence. President Karzai, feeling no heat from his foreign sponsors and pressured by allies like Sayyaf, an avowed foe of the news media, had only this to say:  “The Attorney General we have today is one that is in a head-on clash with the bad guys.”

The concurrent practices of going soft on criminals while cracking down on the media should tell the people of western democracies everything they need to know about the Karzai regime, say its critics. “We are facing the old difficulties of Afghanistan’s history in the last 25 years,” says Shukria Barakzai. “Who is there who isn’t working for his own pocket, who is there who isn’t a warlord or criminal?

“The president is completely isolated from the people. He only listens to this mafia group inside the palace.”

Whose reach, the evidence shows, goes far into the countryside.