Afghan anti-corruption chief is drug dealer

Afghanistan's new anti-corruption chief has a shady past. Izzatullah Wasifi served nearly four years in a US prison for trying to sell heroin to an undercover agent in Las Vegas for $65,000.

It is not the ideal CV for a man appointed to root out corruption in the country that is overwhelmingly the world's biggest supplier of opium, from which heroin in refined.

Mr Wasifi's past came out after an investigation by the Associated Press, which pieced the story together from court records. They revealed that in 1987, Mr Wasifi was arrested at Caesar's Palace Hotel.

Identifying himself only as Mr E, he tried to exchange a bag containing a pound and a half of heroin for $65,000 (£34,000) in cash, unaware the "customer" was a policeman. Mr Wasifi was released on parole after three years and eight months.

The government of President Hamid Karzai has refused to say whether it knew about the drugs conviction when Mr Wasifi was appointed to his post two months ago. A childhood friend of Mr Karzai, today he heads an anti-corruption office of 84 people.

Mr Wasifi has admitted he served time in a Nevada prison but claims the circumstances were different. He says he was arrested after his then-wife bought cocaine for her own use and brought it to their Las Vegas hotel room.

His murky past may be embarrassing for Mr Karzai's government, but it overshadowed a development with potentially much more far-reaching implications yesterday.

Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a warlord who has been fighting as an ally of the Taliban, announced he had split from them and was ready for peace talks with President Karzai. A peace deal with Mr Hekmatyar could be controversial. His past is extremely bloody, and he is blamed by many Afghans for the civil war that tore the country apart after the withdrawal of Soviet forces.

But his Hezb-i-Islami is believed to be the second most powerful insurgent group in Afghanistan, after the Taliban, and Mr Karzai is likely to seize any genuine opportunity to make peace with Mr Hekmatyar and break his alliance with the Taliban. But Mr Hekmatyar has been notorious for switching sides throughout his long career as a warlord; many say it is why he has survived when most of his contemporaries have died. Once supported by the CIA as a mujahedin leader against the Soviets, today he is attacking US forces.

His announcement came in a video in which he answered questions from the Associated Press. He claimed the Taliban had split from the alliance he forged with them in the aftermath of the fall of their regime in 2001.

"The jihad went into high gear, but later it gradually went down as certain elements among the Taliban rejected the idea of a joint struggle against the aggressor," he said. "It was not a good move by the Taliban to disassociate themselves from the joint struggle. Presently, we have no contact with the Taliban.

"We say dialogue can only be fruitful if the aggressors truly allow the Kabul government to halt the fighting, negotiate with the mujahedin and honour what Kabul and the resistance decide. This is the prime and basic demand of the Afghan nation, and if such a conducive environment could be provided, we can go for dialogue with Karzai."