9/11 in Retrospect
Kandahar governor urges Afghans to vote
Last Updated: Wednesday, August 19, 2009 8:54 PM ET CBC News
"The Afghan-Canadian governor of Kandahar urged people to vote on Wednesday as insurgent activity continued to reverberate in the Afghan capital.
"'The security is restored. All the highways are open. All the roads are open. The police, the army and the people are in charge of the security, so there is nothing to be worried about,' Tooryalai Wesa said at a news conference."
Governor Ahmed Wali Karzai
Harper's Magazine, June 29, 2011
By Matthieu Aikins
Last Wednesday, nearly 200 tribal elders and other notables from Kandahar Province convened in the Roshan Plaza in downtown Kabul. The group was a who’s who of pro-government figures, among them Agha Lalai Dastegiri, Fazluddin Agha, and Bacha Sherzai, brother of former governor Gul Agha. They had gathered to petition President Hamid Karzai to appoint his brother Ahmed Wali Karzai as the next governor of the province. (The current leader, Afghan-Canadian Tooryalai Wesa, is widely reputed to be looking for a way out of his job.) The meeting was part of a week-long junket, and according to several people who attended, the cost, which would have been as high as several hundred thousand dollars, was paid by Ahmed Wali Karzai himself.
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The capacity-building option was also the most patently absurd one, however, given that Wesa was a powerless technocrat from British Columbia with links to the Karzai family that dated to his childhood. The notion that Wesa was becoming independent from Ahmed Wali was precisely the kind of nonsense U.S. and Canadian diplomats have been feeding to journalists for the past two years.
Canadians unaware of the good news in Afghanistan: Kandahar governor
By Thane Burnett ,QMI Agency
First posted: Monday, July 4, 2011 8:18:02 CDT AM
