Well, if I have power, I can find them out. Because it needs some machinery to find them out, to discover that, but we can understand that they have very good funders. I mean, the activities they are doing inside Afghanistan...they open a TV channel very easily, and with the radio stations, TV stations, newsletters, magazines, and media power they have, it is very easy for them.
When there is an election, they are so rich, and they spend money for their own candidates to succeed. Also, when there are powerful positions in the government, they buy them; they bribe with very big money. They have so much money that they buy and they give money to the people who look after them to buy houses in certain strategic political points of Kabul and other cities, our lands, placing their party members there.
Also, we see them making political parties within one night, registering them in the government and producing organizations, and they are producing this kind of work very easily, so we can easily understand that there are powerful sources behind them that are funding them enormously. On the other hand, they have made the mafia of power. One brother is doing this business on politics, while the other brother has a construction company and is getting contracts from the American and international community military sources. The next brother.... It's because they have money and they can show their money in their bank account.
There is one criterion: you must have $10 million to get this project worth $40 million on the construction of roads. Of course, who has the money to get the project? It is the brother of that warlord. So the brother of that warlord dresses and shaves very well. He dresses himself very well, with a tie, yes? And he goes to the source—for instance, the military base of the Americans—and gets the projects.
You see, they are getting all the economic opportunities inside Afghanistan. Normal people cannot compete. That is why normal people of Afghanistan have not been empowered. If they enjoy some of the services that have become better through this nine years from their government, that's all for them: this freedom by law to work or get an education, these general services. For the rest, economic opportunity is in the hands of extremism in Afghanistan.
The liberal democrat individuals who came from Canada and America to Afghanistan are technocrats. These technocrats, when they saw these people with this enormous amount of money, they went into partnership with them. For instance, we have a warlord in Afghanistan who is the deputy president. His name is Fahim.
Fahim is now a wealthy person, so the president brought him as the deputy president because of that wealth. Why? It is because the brothers of the president, with the brothers of Marshal Fahim, went into partnership for economic initiatives, buying the mines of Afghanistan, with an international partner, so that made them come together and become president and deputy president.
So what about women? You know that we cannot compete at all.
And what about normal people, civil society? Never. They can never compete. I mean, now that the classes are made and the first class is the warlords and extremist leaders and their families, and our technocrats from the west, because of the money, they went into partnership with them to get economic benefits.... Civil society and women remain unable to get opportunities, apart from small opportunities of working here and there, not the big opportunities or the economic power.
Now they have control over economic power and political power. If there is no decision made and they go on like this, the future of Afghanistan, the political power and determination of who should have it, will be in the hands of people who have the economic power. Those who have the economic power are the extremist families and leaders and warlords. If Parliament is coming, okay, their leaders will be holding the economic power too.
So in future elections, the candidates of this group of people will be the winners, like Karzai was the winner of this last election from the beginning, because of their support. The international community was supporting him because he spoke good English. He was known as somebody who had lived in Virginia in the U.S., who had a U.S. green card and family who lived there for three decades. Those were his credits, and he is a soft and well-behaved man, so he got the international community's credit and trust.
But internally who helped him? Internally, extremism helped him. He went into a partnership with extremists to share power with them. He told them he was the one who would never implement transitional justice; I hear Karzai himself say all the time, Say thanks to God”, to the extremists. It is Karzai who is not putting in this court, so he says, “Support me”. This is the deal inside Afghanistan.
He is right. He's honest with them. He's honest. He's doing it. I mean, transitional justice was not implemented, and this gap was created. And all of these problems we are confronting today and on which the international community is losing their way on how and where to go is because of that.
If we do transitional justice, we will have treated the disease, even if it is postponed or late. If we take the criminals to court, investigate their personal properties, and return the personal properties to the national treasury, together with the UN and the Government of Afghanistan, that will be the way out.
But the Government of Afghanistan now is too much in the hands of extremists. There is nobody--or you cannot find anybody--to raise this with. And there is no machinery to do this, because now all of the members of these parties and groups are members of the government. So now it's not possible.
But when the international community came in first in 2001, all of these extremists were shivering. They were in shock because they were expecting that human rights values would be implemented and that their criminality would be proven before the International Court in The Hague. That was the general mentality of Afghans. But six months later, two years later, and then little by little, their fear was gone and they became courageous enough to stand on their feet and to do what they want.
