Afghanistan is receiving “bundles” of cash payments from Iran, but insisted the funding was “normal.”
Citing two Afghan officials, The New York Times reported Sunday that Iran’s ambassador to Afghanistan, Feda Hussein Maliki, gave Karzai’s chief of staff, Umar Daudzai, “a large plastic bag bulging with packets of euro bills” on a flight in August.
The newspaper said the cash was “part of a secret, steady stream of Iranian cash intended to … promote Iran’s interests in the presidential palace.” Western and Afghan officials allege that “Iran uses its influence to help drive a wedge between the Afghans and their American and NATO benefactors,” the Times said.
When asked about the allegations at a press conference in Kabul on Monday, Karzai said: “We have accepted cash payments from Iran, large sums. This is normal.”
When asked whether receiving cash was unusual, Karzai added: “The US gives us large bundles of cash as well.
In Washington, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said the United States had at times made payments to Karzai in cash, but now makes payments electronically to the Afghan government.
Karzai said his aide, Daudzai, received “500,000, 600,000 or 700,000 euros … once or twice a year” on “my orders.… We are grateful for the Iranians for the help they give us and we will continue to ask them for cash help.” He called the transactions “very transparent.”
He said other governments also gave him cash aid. The only one he named was the UAE, which he said was the first government to provide cash aid nine years ago. He said he received $1.5 million during a visit to the UAE.
Karzai said the Iranian cash was “used for the presidential office, paying staff and other uses at presidential discretion.”
Karzai’s comments came after a former governor of a border province, who says he was ousted for his criticisms of Tehran, asserted that Afghanistan and its Western allies are dangerously underestimating Iran’s destabilizing influence on the country.
Ghulam Dastgir Azaad, who ran western Nimroz for five years, said he frequently investigated and was sometimes an intended target of attacks inside Afghanistan that variously used Iranian-supplied weapons or Iranian-trained militants.
The government and its foreign allies are too focused on Afghanistan’s southeastern neighbor, Pakistan, in the search for stability and have ignored the role of Iran, Azaad said.
“No one pays as much attention to Iran as Pakistan, but that’s a mistake…. Iran plays its own hidden game to increase its influence in western areas [of Afghanistan],” he told Reuters Sunday in an interview at his Kabul apartment.
“We [in Nimroz] share about 90 kilometers [56 miles] of border with Iran, which Iran easily exploits to regularly send explosive devices and weapons into Afghanistan,” said Azaad, who left his job in the province two months ago.
A senior border policeman told Reuters that two weeks ago 19 metric tons of explosives were found in a 40-foot container coming from Iran, hidden under food items. He said he had been advised not to speak badly of Iranian influence in the area, and asked to remain anonymous.
Nimroz lies in Afghan-istan’s southwest and is mostly empty desert. It shares a border with Iran to the west and Pakistan to the south — countries Azaad dubs “monster neighbors” — and has long been a crossroads for smugglers.
He said several would-be suicide attackers had been detained in the province and confessed to police that they received training in Iran.
“I also had evidence that Iran misuses Afghan refugees by providing shelter, equipment, training then sending them to carry out attacks against the government and NATO troops,” he said.
Azaad said his outspoken criticism of the Iranian government made him a target of six suicide attacks during his years in charge, and eventually cost him his job.
“Iran wanted to get rid of me either physically by sending suicide squads or politically. In the end, Tehran managed to remove me politically,” he said.
Karzai’s office in Kabul declined comment on Azaad’s remarks, but said it was normal procedure to transfer or replace a governor or other senior provincial official who had spent several years in one post.