Karzai takes on Fahim, Afghan secret service

Karzai and his allies describe the secret service — once again controlled by Fahim — as a vast, corrupt and highly politicised apparatus that operates outside the president’s authority. The agency has 30,000 employees and its departments are run by Tajiks from the Northern Alliance who report to Fahim.

Now, Karzai has pledged to take on the agency. He named a high-level commission this month to recommend reforms and investigate allegations that the secret service tortured and killed Abdul Mutaleb, 22, who had just returned to Afghanistan after living for years as a refugee in Pakistan.

Karzai’s challenge to the intelligence service is seen here as a contest over who will rule post-Taliban Afghanistan. To the ethnic Pashtun president and his supporters, the unchecked power of the Tajik-run secret service is a key obstacle to Afghan democracy that lies closer to home than regional warlords who refuse to disarm their men or lurking remnants of the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

‘‘For a democratic country, a country that wants to move toward democracy, an institution like this is obviously in contradiction,’’ said Vice President Hedayat Amin Arsala, who’s leading the commission.

After the Soviet invasion in 1979, the KGB created the Afghan intelligence agency in its own image. The agency, known by the acronym KHAD, had a network of neighbourhood informers and a reputation for torture and killing that made it as notorious as any of the spy agencies in the Eastern Bloc. As control of Afghanistan passed from Soviet hands to Islamic guerrillas to the Taliban movement, the security service’s name changed — it’s now known officially as the National Security Directorate and locally as Amaniyat.

But many of its methods are the same, as are many of the operatives who carry them out, according to the agency’s critics. After the Taliban collapsed, the Northern Alliance installed its own leadership at the agency, and allies of Karzai say it remains a Soviet-style institution. ‘‘It hasn’t changed at all from the KGB,’’ said a former intelligence operative familiar with the agency’s workings. (LATWP)