Afghanistan Peace Campaign
The son, Haji Zaher Qadir, commonly known as Haji Zaher, inherited a large share of his father’s dominion over Nangrahar, as well as its rivalries and dirtier politics. He was a prominent militia leader in the province from the early years of the new Islamic Republic onwards, described in a Human Rights Watch report from 2004 as operating “criminal enterprises and continue to engage in numerous human rights abuses, including the seizure of land and other property, kidnapping civilians for ransom, and extorting money.”
He also got a lucrative job – a perfect fit for his family business interests – Commander of the Frontier Brigade of the Eastern Region (see this 2005 UNDP report about him handing in mortars, heavy calibre weapon rounds and landmines as part of the Disarmament of Illegal Groups (DIAG) programme) and later Commander of the 8th Border Battalion based in Takhar Province. Both positions straddled important narcotics smuggling routes. According to a 2007 State Department report, he was asked to leave his post in June 2006 “due to allegations of corruption, but he refused to do so.” Even when his salary was stopped, he “continued to operate, reportedly using his own funds to pay officers’ salaries and funded more than 1,000 additional officers, essentially forming a private militia.”
He was finally forced out in 2007 after his cousin and assistant, Bilal, and four other border police were caught in Takhar province in a car loaded with heroin, described in a 2008 report by the State Department:
Five Afghan Border Police officers were arrested while transporting 123.5 kg of heroin from Nangarhar to Takhar Province. The heroin was seized outside Kabul. At the time, the officers were transporting the heroin in a Border Police truck. The officers worked for Border Police Commander Haji Zahir, also alleged to be a drug trafficker. Defendants in the case included his personal body guard and his nephew, who acts as his personal secretary.
This (and no doubt some US pressure) was enough to stymie his border police gig, but he himself managed to evade arrest (NYT, Globe and Mail). However, he and his uncle, Haji Din Muhammad, did manage to get Bilal sprung from jail in 2009 in the run-up to the presidential election: President Hamed Karzai was courting Din Muhammad and Zaher for support and the price was a pardon for Bilal – Karzai was to pardon many others when politics demanded (Boston News/Associated Press, Telegraph).[2]
Meanwhile, Zaher’s career changed track. Like many former commanders who lost posts due to allegations of criminality or abuse, he managed to get himself comfortably elected in the 2010 parliamentary elections and then went on to become a deputy speaker in 2012 (Pajhwok). The impunity Zaher enjoyed for his illicit activities, like so many of his power broker peers, was wired into the twisted Afghan state.
His notoriety did trigger some direct confrontations, however: in 2011 he was accused by the Attorney General of drug smuggling, charges he dismissed as trumped up by his enemies (AAN). In 2013, Finance Minister Omar Zakhilwal (who was at the time himself under threat of impeachment) accused him in parliament of smuggling thousands of trucks of flour worth “$269 million” (RFE/RL). Zaher’s ‘defence’ was that he sat on such a huge fortune – USD 365 million – that he had no need to evade customs duties (prompting disgust from some Afghans quoted in this Tolo story).
In 2017, AAN reported on Haji Zaher having forces in the so-called ‘uprising’ militias, as well as the Afghan Local Police and Afghan National Border Police in Achin, Nazyan and Kot districts in Nangrahar that were involved in the fight against the Islamic State in Khorasan Province (ISKP). “Locals,” we reported, “have alleged that Zaher benefits from smuggling and illegal checkpoints and these ‘business interests’ have been hurt by the growth of ISKP and the Taleban, reducing the territory in Nangrahar under his influence.” The report also noted that forces loyal to Zaher had beheaded a number of alleged ISKP fighters and displayed their heads on the main road – an action which Zaher defended. Despite this, his ability to raise militias and anti-ISKP stance raised his value to the US government. At the time, Zaher did not take a known hostile position against the Taliban. In fact, AAN was told there were channels between the two parties.
America as self-appointed drug police to the world
Zaher is far from the first Afghan to be picked up by the long arm of American law, which respects almost no territorial boundary in its ‘war on drugs’, any more than in its ‘war-on-terror’.[3] It was President Richard Nixon who first declared a ‘war on drugs’ in 1971 (Time), described by the US social justice charity, the Vera Institute, as a “wrongheaded, racist policy decision,” given the subsequent decades of discriminatory practices towards minority communities in the US. The international reach of the Drug Enforcement Administration was initially focused on South and Central America, the effects of which are still felt today (Harvard International Review, Guardian). But it was the 9/11 attacks that made Afghanistan the epicentre of the DEA’s drugs war and what it called narcoterrorism.
Despite scant evidence that Osama bin Laden himself was directly connected to the Afghan drug trade, George W Bush declared that the al-Qaeda network in Afghanistan was linked to heroin trafficking (CBS News). The DEA got a massive spike in funding, a new Counter-Narco-Terrorism Operations Center and an office in Kabul (ProPublica). But the DEA soon wanted – and got – wider powers. Most of the Afghan opiate trade was heading for Europe and Russia, putting some traffickers beyond the DEA’s reach. So in 2006, Bush signed into law a new statute that allowed the DEA to pursue drug trafficking anywhere in the world, whether or not it had a domestic US nexus, as long as it was connected to terrorism (ProPublica). One former DEA agent joked to reporter Ginger Thompson in a 2015 story for ProPublica that “The law was so wide open you could indict a bologna sandwich.”
Afghans targeted by the DEA
The DEA had successfully prosecuted Afghans prior to receiving their expanded authority, but the pace picked up after 2006. The first Afghan to be extradited to the US from Afghanistan was Baz Muhammad – which took place with the consent of President Karzai in October 2005 (Department of Justice). The DEA claimed that Baz Muhammad had been funnelling heroin profits to support the Taliban from 1994 to 2000 (Justice Department), with the head of the DEA at the time claiming that “This drug kingpin bragged that he waged jihad against Americans by poisoning them with his heroin” (Reuters).
In a number of instances, Afghans have claimed that they were informants or allies of the United States – as Zaher once was – before they found themselves picked up by the DEA. Haji Bashir Nurzai, for example, described by US officials as “the Pablo Escobar of heroin trafficking in Asia,” was (and is) closely connected to the Taliban, but also had ties to the United States before his arrest (FRE/RL). At his trial in 2008, he was sentenced to life imprisonment despite claiming a history of cooperation with Americans in the 1990s and after 2001. Nurzai was released in September 2022 in exchange for an American, Mark Frerich, who had been held by the Taliban since 2020 (Al Jazeera), which rather undermined his US ‘Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation’. The prisoner swap also revealed how important Bashir Nurzai was to the newly re-established Islamic Emirate, as did the hero’s welcome he was reported as having received from officials at Kabul airport on his return (Kabul Now).
Haji Juma Khan’s story is also of an ally or informant turned DEA target. When he was extradited to the US from Indonesia in 2008, he was also proclaimed a drugs kingpin and sentenced to two life sentences (Justice Department). That may have been true, but he was also reputedly a CIA and DEA informant (New York Times). Presumably, he was a useful one since he was quietly released in April 2018 (The Intercept). [4] Despite his release, the ‘Hajji Juma Khan Organisation’ remains listed and subject to sanctions, according to the US Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Act (see also this US treasury organogram of the ‘New Ansari Network’ that Juma Khan is placed atop).
The DEA has often been criticised for its reliance on sting operations, often luring targets into committing crimes, which several Afghans may have fallen foul of. Such tactics are used in both domestic and international cases, which the agency defends as allowing for a controlled means of arrest and evidence gathering. In this NYT piece about the DEA, a defence lawyer protests that for his client, “There were no drug dealers or drugs. There were not even any guns until the government, through repeated entreaties and enticements, convinced the defendants to obtain and bring them.”
Afghans picked up for ‘narcoterrorism’ who may have been trapped by similar tactics include Khan Muhammad, who in 2008 received two life sentences for attempting to distribute heroin in the United States, as well as using the proceeds to support the Taliban (Justice Department). The story revealed in this Department of Justice press release suggests a sting. The DEA investigation began after a tip-off via Afghan security forces from an Afghan farmer who said he had been approached by some Taliban to fire a rocket at Jalalabad Airfield. The farmer mentioned that he knew that one of the Talibs, Khan Muhammad, “had previously been involved in opium and heroin trafficking.” The DEA persuaded the farmer (presumably, paid him) to meet the Talib again, wearing a wire, through which he recorded further conversations about rocket attacks. It is over a series of conversations with the DEA informant “that Muhammed agreed to act as a broker for the purchase of opium,” which begs the question as to whether Khan Muhammad returned to the opium trade because the DEA invited him to, thus enabling them to arrest him.
The case of Haji Bagcho, too, revealed what appears to have been a stretch by the DEA. In 2012, Bagcho, dubbed a “heroin godfather” by a DEA agent (CNN), was convicted in a US court for conspiracy, distribution of heroin for importation into the United States and narcoterrorism. The DEA cited a ledger of Bagcho’s showing heroin transactions worth USD 250 million in 2006 alone, adding:
Based on heroin production statistics compiled by the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime for 2006, the defendant’s trafficking accounted for approximately 20 percent of the total amount of heroin produced worldwide that year.
However, while the DEA appeared to have ample evidence for his role in trafficking, the evidence of his connection to the Taliban, according to court records, was based only on a DEA informant, who the DEA later admitted was “not credible.” In 2015, Bagcho’s lawyers successfully argued for a new trial (see court record), resulting in the narcoterrorism charge being dropped, though the two drug convictions remained.
The DEA operation against Haji Abdul Satar Abdul Manaf also relied on undercover DEA agents. In August 2024, Manaf was sentenced to thirty years imprisonment for trying to import heroin into the US, as well as terror-related charges. A US Department of Justice official said: “Haji Abdul Satar Abdul Manaf used heroin as a weapon of war, funding the Taliban and Haqqani Network to spread terror and death.” Manaf had been sanctioned by the US in 2012, then arrested and extradited from Estonia in 2019 for “storing or moving money for the Taliban” through his business, the Haji Khairullah Haji Sattar Money Exchange (US Dept of Justice).
DEA agents had themselves enticed Manaf to supply to the United States, as made clear in this Department of Justice press release:
MANAF participated in in-person meetings, recorded telephone calls, and electronic communications with five individuals whom MANAF understood to be affiliated with an international drug trafficking organization. During those meetings, MANAF helped arrange to import large quantities of heroin into the U.S. with the assistance of—and recognizing that some of the proceeds of that narcotics trafficking would be provided to—the Taliban and the Haqqani Network. Four of these individuals were, in fact, DEA confidential sources. The fifth was an undercover DEA agent (the “UC”).
This proclivity for sting operations was the subject of a 2015 investigative report by ProPublica, which found a “disturbing number” of incidents where DEA undercover agents were themselves presented as evidence in “staged narcoterrorism conspiracies.” Another example reported included another Afghan, Taza Gul Alizai, who sold heroin to an undercover DEA agent who had been posing as a member of the Taliban (State Department). His lawyer said he had been lured to the Maldives with the promise of dental treatment, where he was arrested (ProPublica).
The DEA finally moves on Haji Zaher
Haji Zaher stayed in Afghanistan after the fall of the Republic, seemingly continuing some of his business activities. As noted above, prior to their return to power, the Taliban had reportedly reached a degree of accommodation with him, perhaps united by a shared enemy, the Islamic State in Khorasan Province, which Zaher had directed his militias against (New Lines Institute). According to one source who follows illicit economies and armed groups in Afghanistan, his business had continued, “in harmony with the Taliban.”
As to what those businesses might be, the Islamic Emirate banned opium cultivation, processing and trade in 2022. However, the sharp drop in opium cultivation did trigger a surge in opium prices, making the substantial stockpiles highly lucrative. It may not be surprising then that, according to a March 2025 report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, “drug trafficking in Afghanistan remains a highly profitable illicit trade.” Possibly Haji Zaher is still involved in his old trade.
The Nairobi court heard that there were also charges involving machine guns against Zaher: the Afghan trade in weapons, long intertwined with drug trafficking, is also going strong. In 2023, the UN Sanctions Monitoring team reported failings in IEA attempts to centralise weapons control, and reported that allowing local commanders to keep “20 per cent of weaponry captured” and the “gifting of weapons” were both widely practised. The February 2025 report by the same UN team found that al-Qaeda-affiliated groups “continued to have access to weapons seized from the former Afghan National Army, transferred to them by the de facto authorities/Taliban or purchased from the black market.” Research by the Small Arms Survey published in March 2025 found that arms trafficking continues, “likely with at least the tacit approval of low-level Taliban officials.”
US President Donald Trump made the Afghan weapons trade a priority. Trump reportedly told his first cabinet meeting in February 2025, “Afghanistan is one of the biggest sellers of military equipment in the world, you know why? They’re selling the equipment that we left. … but we want our military equipment back” (BBC). In the same month, Emirate spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid seemed to respond to Trump’s threat, saying: “We will use these weapons to repel invaders who dare to seize them” (VOA). A 2022 estimate by the US Department of Defence said that US-funded equipment worth USD 7.12 billion had been left in the hands of the Republic, most of which was seized by the Taliban.
For the DEA, this presidential enthusiasm for action at a time when political interest in Afghanistan is otherwise so low may have spurred it on. It has had an interest in Zaher well back into the Republic era – it is possible that much of the evidence they had against him predates whatever business dealings he has had under the IEA. The internal State Department reporting noted above suggests there was some US political pressure for his removal from his border police role in 2006-07. The source mentioned earlier that follows illicit economies and armed groups in Afghanistan told AAN that he was also aware of DEA requests to move Zaher on, much later, from 2014 to 2018, which were stymied by “high level” political opposition from within the US administration. This protection could have come from those in the US government who were focused on peace deals with the Taliban, since he had demonstrated some ability to reach an accommodation with them, or simply because the US military valued his forces – brutal, but effective – against ISKP in the east. That the DEA could move against him now, the source said, “is a Trumpian effect,” with the agency unfettered by competing State Department or national security priorities.
As for Zaher’s presence in Nairobi, Afghan smugglers may be less common in West Africa than, say, Turkey, but their trade has long had a global reach. A 2015 UN Office on Drugs and Crime report found that while trafficking of Afghan heroin in Africa had existed at low levels from the 1980s, there was a marked increase in interdictions after around 2009. However, as the stories of previous arrests of Afghans show, when it comes to the DEA, the possibility of a sting operation against Zaher also seems highly plausible.
The end of immunity?
If Haji Zaher appears in the Southern District of New York courtroom, he will have been many years and many miles from the parliamentary privileges and presidential protection that he once enjoyed. The DEA should finally get to put its evidence against him in a time and place where he has no leverage.
There are plenty of reasons to question the American ‘war on drugs’, both for its aggressive claim to universal jurisdiction as well as its selective application. Zaher himself was protected by the United States under the Republic, but not under the Emirate. Bashir Nurzai was a priority drugs ‘kingpin’ until he was a useful trade in a prisoner exchange: he is now back in Afghanistan and presumably enjoys some leeway to pick up his business dealings where he left off. The DEA and other US agencies have probably contributed to the enrichment of more Afghan drug traffickers than they have convicted, from informants to undercover agents to counter-terrorism security entrepreneurs.
At the same time, many will be glad to see Haji Zaher fall from grace. He was one of a generation of political figures who abused his successive positions of power to enrich himself, strike at rivals and grab land, helping to keep millions of Afghans trapped in poverty and the Republic mired in corruption. Other Republic-era profiteers may be revising their travel plans for fear that the DEA has more targets in its sights. There is a fairly extensive list of Afghans who once enjoyed covert US protection, who may now, finally, be vulnerable, at least on trafficking charges.
Edited by Kate Clark
References
| ↑1 | Barnett Rubin described in 2000 how the Arsala clan had become rich:
The Arsala clan (Haji Abdul Qadir and his brothers) was at the center of the commercial development of Jalalabad, profiting from Nangarhar province’s skyrocketing opium production and using the Jalalabad airport as a center for the import of goods from Dubai for smuggling into Pakistan in alliance with Afghan and Pakistani Pashtun truckers and the local administration of the NWFP [North-West Frontier Province]. The Political Economy of War and Peace in Afghanistan, Institute for Afghan Studies, June 1999. Vanda Felbab-Brown also wrote about how the Arsala clan benefitted from Nangrahar’s position as the second largest provincial source of opium in Afghanistan, although she said he had done a deal with the United States to reduce opium production in exchange for development assistance. See ‘Shooting Up: The Impact of Illicit Economies on Military Conflict,’ PHD thesis, 1999, p398 (available as a PDF from MIT). This 2003 RFE/RL article also quotes Qadir as having criticised the dishonesty of internationals for not delivering on their promises to support farmers in exchange for them stopping growing poppy. |
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| ↑2 | Kate Clark and Stephen Carter’s 2010 report, No Shortcut to Stability Justice, Politics and Insurgency in Afghanistan, p33, details Karzai’s pardoning of rapists, a kidnapper of United Nations staff and drug smugglers. They reported Amnesty International’s Sam Zarifi’s estimate that Karzai was issuing 800-1,000 pardons annually and that, ahead of the presidential elections, the numbers had gone up, with most being granted to people associated with powerful families. Also, coincidentally on p33 of that report, then Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commissioner, Nader Nadery uses a discussion with a judge in Nangrahar to illustrate the impossibility of getting justice in Afghanistan. The judge named Haji Zaher and Din Muhammad as putting pressure to get the verdicts they wanted and asks: “’Why wouldn’t this happen, when I go on my bicycle to buy potatoes and they all have bodyguards and armoured cars?’” |
| ↑3 | For an academic article which compares the two, see Wadie E Said, Limitless Discretion in the Wars on Drugs and Terror, University of Colorado Law Review, vol 89, 2018, Issue 1. See also, Emma Björnehed, Narco-Terrorism: The Merger of the War on Drugs and the War on Terror, Global Crime, vol 6, 2004, pp305-324. |
| ↑4 | Vice interviewed the former head of the DEA in Afghanistan who had been Juma Khan’s ‘handler’; he expressed both admiration for Juma Khan as well as shame for betraying him. |