A Kandahar Killing: What Does It Mean for the U.S. Military Mission? 
 
 A huge power vacuum has opened in southern Afghanistan with the assassination on July 12 of Ahmed Wali Karzai, a half brother of President Hamid Karzai and, fundamentally, the godfather of Kandahar. U.S. officials are debating whether he will be followed by a more benign tribal autocrat or someone alleged to be just as bad — and how much influence the Taliban will have over whoever fills his shoes. 
 
 Quick answer: there will be blood. 
 
 The assassination couldn't come at a worse time for the U.S. military, which is wrapping up more than a year's worth of intense fighting in the region. While the gains are routinely described as "fragile," Washington was counting on a steady hand from the Karzai clan — in both Kabul and Kandahar — to cement them into place. That effort may have been mortally wounded along with Wali Karzai on Tuesday. Or — if you buy into the notion that Wali Karzai was a corrupt warlord whose presence reduced the chance for progress in southern Afghanistan — his death could turn out to be a bloody blessing. No one knows yet. 
 
 It's not yet clear why Sardar Mohammed, a longtime family friend, apparently turned on Wali Karzai. The Taliban has claimed responsibility for the slaying, and certainly it will reap a whirlwind of fear for its role. That's true even if the Taliban is limited to creating the conditions that make everyday Afghans fear for their safety. The assassination dramatically highlights the fact that the nation's security forces — in which the U.S. has invested $28.5 billion, more than the $24.2 billion spent on Iraq's military and police — cannot protect their nation's most powerful leaders. 
 
 Wali Karzai overshadowed Kandahar province's official governor, Tooryalai Wesa, by dint of the Karzai family legacy there. The Pashtun tribe, in which the Karzais are a prominent clan, has traditionally held sway over a wide swath of southern Afghanistan, lapping into Pakistan. That has made it tough for the U.S. military — or anyone else — to seal the border between the two nations. 
 
 Wali Karzai served as the provincial council chairman for Kandahar, the Taliban's birthplace. He oversaw a web of warlords across the region, involved in trade that was legitimate and not — smuggling, narcotics and gun running have long been big businesses in the region. The Afghan President resolutely denies that his half brother, who was paid by the CIA for information, had a role in such traffic. "We have no intelligence that leads us to believe that he's criminally involved," then U.S. Army Lieut. General Douglas Lute said a year ago. But U.S. military officials in the region long believed Wali Karzai was involved in enterprises both fair and foul. 
 
 "He's either a candidate for an Oscar or he's the most maligned man in Afghanistan," British Major General Nick Carter told reporters at the Pentagon in May 2010. Wali Karzai repeatedly told allied military leaders that he was "trying to help his country, that he's trying to help us and he's trying to help his people," Carter said. "And he will also tell you that, as an avid Chelsea soccer club watcher and supporter, he'd rather be watching soccer than he would providing governance." 
 
 But Wali Karzai had his hands in everything, hindering the governor's role. He had "close links with a number of Kandahar's key private security and militia commanders," Moshe Schwartz, a military expert at the Congressional Research Service, told Congress in June 2010. "Several of these commanders control key logistics routes and are heavily relied upon by almost the whole host nation, trucking companies operating in southern Afghanistan. Ahmed Wali Karzai has used his connections to the Afghan government and to ISAF [the International Security Assistance Force] to build this network and, in some cases, to influence in the awarding of contracts to his own allies." 
 
 That's why there were always long lines of favor seekers in and out of Wali Karzai's home in central Kandahar. There were some 60 people there on Tuesday when he was killed. It was plain that, despite the best efforts of the U.S. and its allies, Wali Karzai was still the man to see to get things done in southern Afghanistan. Major General Carter knew what he had to measure to gauge the prospects for progress in the region: he wanted to see the governor's role increase and Wali Karzai's decline: "We will very much judge success by the extent to which that balance switches and, metaphorically speaking, the queue outside the governor's office goes up and the queue outside the provincial council's office goes down." 
 
 There will be no favor-seeking queue outside Wali Karzai's home on Wednesday. ||||| By Max Fisher 
 
 Reuters 
 
 In late 2009, when the New York Times first reported that the CIA had for years been working with Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president's half-brother and a major player in the heroin trade, Major General Michael T. Flynn, the top military intelligence officer in Afghanistan, told the newspaper, "If we are going to conduct a population-centric strategy in Afghanistan, and we are perceived as backing thugs, then we are just undermining ourselves," he said. "The only way to clean up Chicago is to get rid of Capone." Flynn's comment underscored one of the war's many challenges: the military, which has led the international mission in Afghanistan since 2001, and the CIA, which had spearheaded U.S. interests in Afghanistan from the 1979 Soviet invasion through September 11, 2001, often work at cross purposes and toward different goals.Today's killing of Ahmed Wali Karzai, reportedly by a close business associate , is a reminder of the complicated web of loyalties, interests, and contradictions that the U.S. has attempted to navigate for nearly a decade. Ahmed Wali Karzai was a politician working within the system and a criminal working against it; he ran militias on behalf of the CIA and funded drug networks that were the stated enemy of the U.S. military; he worked with trucking contractors that sold services to NATO and that funded anti-NATO warlords; he was a close ally of the U.S. and a tremendous drag on its mission to win over the Afghan people.Even in death, he is a contradiction. His killing, as the half brother of the nation's president, is both major news for the Afghan war and barely news at all; in March, President Karzai's cousin was killed by a U.S. night raid, a tragedy for the family that had little appreciable affect on an already sour Obama-Karzai relationship.Ahmed Wali Karzai was exactly the kind of local "big man" -- he was a major player in the southern province of Kandahar, which has seen heavy fighting and a big U.S. push -- whom the U.S. mission both relied on and worked against. His cooperation and help was crucial in arranging day-to-day political deals; guys like Ahmed Wali, quite simply, can get things done in a way that we can't. But the things that make men like Ahmed Wali useful in the particular also make them burdensome in general. His power, inextricably linked with his corruption, came from a self-interested, unaccountable Afghan political system that enrages many Afghans and leaves them feeling disconnected from their government. He was part of a system that fueled the war, and he helped us navigate that system while simultaneously worsening it.Whatever the meaning of Ahmed Wali Karzai's death for the Afghan war, his killing, like so much in the final ten years of his life, underscores the challenge that the U.S. has faced in the Afghan political system, which we rely upon in the short-term but which, in the long term, is a major hurdle in our effort toward peace and stability. Despite many efforts, we have not succeeded in unknotting this contradiction. It's little wonder, then, that President Obama appears bent on extricating the U.S. from a conflict that we have been unable to untangle, much less win. ||||| 1 of 5. Ahmad Wali Karzai speaks at a news conference in Quetta, Pakistan in this still image taken from a December 2001 video. 
 
 KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (Reuters) - The younger half-brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, one of the most powerful and controversial men in southern Afghanistan, was shot dead at his home on Tuesday by a senior and highly trusted family security guard. 
 
 Ahmad Wali Karzai's assassination will leave a dangerous power vacuum in volatile Kandahar province, the Taliban's birthplace and a focus of recent efforts by a surge of U.S. troops to turn the tide against the insurgency. 
 
 He was accused of corruption and ties to the opium trade, but always denied wrongdoing and was strongly supported by his brother whose influence he shored up in the south. 
 
 President Karzai may find his reach there is now limited as a potentially violent power struggle plays out among the possible successors to his brother. 
 
 "We felt more safe when Ahmad Wali Karzai was around," said Tooryalai Wesa, the governor of Kandahar who outranked Karzai, but like almost everyone in the province deferred to him. 
 
 "His loss will have a negative impact on issues with tribes, and current affairs and security. Kandahar today witnessed the darkest day," Wesa added at a news conference. 
 
 Ahmad Wali Karzai, born in 1961. was head of the Kandahar Provincial Council, a largely consultative role, but his power came from his family and tribal connections and his fortune. 
 
 He was shot dead by Sardar Mohammad, a senior member of the Karzai family's security team in Kandahar who had known his victim for at least a decade and was based at a compound in the village of Karz, where both brothers were born. 
 
 Mohammad traveled into Kandahar on Tuesday morning saying he had an application he needed to give his boss, Kandahar police chief Abdul Razeq told a news conference. 
 
 "The man carried his pistol through the security checks to Wali Karzai's room. As soon as Wali Karzai came out of bathroom, he opened fire and shot him in the head and chest," Razeq said. 
 
 Mohammad was shot dead by Karzai's bodyguards moments after opening fire, witnesses and officials said. 
 
 Ahmad Wali Karzai was the first of Karzai's close relatives to be killed since he became president, but their father was assassinated in 1999 while in exile in Pakistan. 
 
 "My younger brother was martyred in his house today," President Karzai said at a news conference in Kabul held with his visiting French counterpart, Nicolas Sarkozy. "I hope these miseries, which every Afghan family faces, will one day end." 
 
 The White House condemned the killing in "the strongest possible terms" spokesman Jay Carney said. Asked about a reported Taliban claim of responsibility, Carney said, "We don't know who's responsible. There have been some claims, and we will certainly work with the Afghan authorities on that." 
 
 Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called President Karzai to express condolences to him and his family and said in a statement that the United States condemned the assassination "in the strongest terms." 
 
 "We join President Karzai in his prayer for peace and stability in Afghanistan and remain committed to supporting the government and people of Afghanistan in their struggle for peace," Clinton said in a State Department statement. 
 
 The top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan David Petraeus and Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani were among others who condemned the killing and offered condolences. 
 
 "MANY ENEMIES" 
 
 Karzai flew to Kandahar for the burial, set for early Wednesday morning, with ministers and other officials. Security was dramatically tightened, with helicopters circling overhead, extra checkpoints and many roads closed. 
 
 The killing cast a shadow over the city, which has been a focus of violence in recent months as the Taliban came under pressure in surrounding districts from a wave of extra troops ordered in by U.S. President Barack Obama in 2009. 
 
 More than half of all assassinations in Afghanistan since March were carried out in Kandahar city, a U.N. report said. 
 
 The Taliban claimed responsibility for one of the most high-profile political killings of the last decade after news of his death became public. In the past the security services have sometimes doubted instances when they have claimed responsibility. 
 
 Years in power and his sometimes ruthless operating methods meant there might be many other people keen to target Karzai, who was often known simply by his initials, AWK. 
 
 "I'm not sure whether I would assume that this was the Taliban because he had a lot of enemies down there," said Thomas Ruttig, co-director of the Afghanistan Analysts Network. 
 
 But regardless of whether they had a hand in the killing, the Taliban are likely to benefit from his death. 
 
 "(He) is irreplaceable in Kandahar," said Haroun Mir, head of Afghanistan's Center for Research and Policy studies. 
 
 "Despite all the criticism, he was a stabilizing factor in Kandahar. Now Ahmad Wali Karzai is not there, others in Kandahar will be afraid. This is a real boost to the Taliban." 
 
 Ahmad Wali Karzai had survived several other assassination attempts, including a May 2009 ambush on the road to Kabul when Taliban insurgents killed one of his bodyguards. 
 
 CRITICAL POWER BROKER 
 
 Ahmad Wali Karzai returned to Afghanistan after the removal of the Taliban government, leaving behind a career as a restaurateur in Chicago to eventually become probably the most powerful man in Kandahar. 
 
 The president will miss his support, particularly at a time when he is mired in a long-running dispute with parliament and faces a slow but steady reduction in Western financial and military support over the next four years. 
 
 The killing is also likely to alarm Western military and civilian officials, despite misgivings they had about him, because it comes at a time when they are trying to map out their departure from Afghanistan. 
 
 "The Americans and the British were extremely dependent on him for keeping a lot of these very prominent Pashtun tribes in line and not going over to the Taliban," said Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani expert on the Taliban. 
 
 (Additional reporting by Hamid Shalizi, Jonathon Burch and Michelle Nichols in Kabul, and Matt Spetalnick in Washington; Writing by Emma Graham-Harrison; Editing by Matthew Jones and Paul Simao) ||||| KABUL, Afghanistan — Ahmed Wali Karzai , the powerful half brother of Afghanistan ’s president, was assassinated Tuesday, removing from the political scene a divisive power broker who was accused of corruption and alienated the American military, but whose connections and ruthlessness made him a critical force in volatile southern Afghanistan. 
 
 The death of Mr. Karzai, who effectively ruled much of the country’s southern tier from Kandahar, sent tremors through the country’s political establishment and raised questions about whether tenuous security gains made by the influx of American forces in the south could hold. 
 
 Mr. Karzai was shot to death by a police official, Sardar Muhammad, a longtime confidant, who was immediately killed by Mr. Karzai’s bodyguards, Afghan officials said. Mr. Muhammad’s body was later hung above a busy Kandahar street. His motives were not known; the Taliban claimed responsibility for the killing, but there was no evidence that Mr. Muhammad, a member of the Karzais’ Populzai tribe, had ties to the insurgency. 
 
 The immediate implications of Mr. Karzai’s death for the American-led war against the Taliban and the withdrawal of American troops beginning this month were uncertain. Many in the region warned that the Taliban, as well as competitors for Mr. Karzai’s position, would try to take advantage of the power vacuum and that without him the hard-earned security gains made by American and Afghan troops over the past year could erode. 
 
 American military commanders have long argued that Mr. Karzai’s reputation for blatant self-dealing undercut support for the government among many Afghans, and some wondered on Tuesday whether his death might make room for a leader with greater integrity. 
 
 But those commanders had clashed with Central Intelligence Agency officers who had long paid Mr. Karzai for information and other services and saw him as a crucial broker of intelligence and influence. Mr. Karzai identified Taliban fighters for attack by American forces, recruited Afghan men for a NATO-allied “Kandahar Strike Force,” and even rented space to the agency in the city, officials said. 
 
 In a sense, contradictory American attitudes toward Mr. Karzai have reflected the evolving American war strategy. When the United States was trying to win over the population with a counterinsurgency strategy, the corruption he symbolized was an insurmountable obstacle. But as the Obama administration has gradually embraced a more limited counterterrorism policy — killing Taliban fighters and moving toward political negotiations — Mr. Karzai became an indispensable, if never fully trustworthy, ally. 
 
 “We viewed him as more of an enemy of our enemy than as a friend,” said Bill Harris, who until last November served as the senior American diplomat in Kandahar. 
 
 “The fact is, we made common cause with A.W.K. during the last fighting season to run the Taliban out of Kandahar, and we should make no apologies for that,” Mr. Harris said, using the government’s shorthand for Ahmed Wali Karzai. “His death will only complicate an already complicated situation.” 
 
 One American official on Tuesday lamented the “huge power vacuum” left by the assassination. “Do we care more about security and fighting the Taliban, or about drugs and corruption?” said the official, who would discuss the internal debate only on the condition of anonymity. “I think that most people would agree that taking on the Taliban is our top priority, and Ahmed Wali Karzai helped us with that.” 
 
 Mohammed Naim Hamidzai Lalai, the chairman of the Afghan Parliament’s internal security committee and a Kandahari, said, “His presence in Kandahar was like a backbone for the security of the province.” 
 
 The president, Hamid Karzai, held a news conference in Kabul with President Nicolas Sarkozy of France barely two hours after the shooting, speaking in a steady but somber voice as he confirmed the death of his half brother.
– So what does the killing of Hamid Karzai's powerful half-brother in southern Afghanistan mean for the war effort? Such is the contradiction of Ahmad Wali Karzai that the only answer seems to be "stay tuned": Mark Thompson, Time: The killing of the "godfather of Kandahar" is horrible timing for the US military, which needs stability from the Karzai clan to shore up fragile gains. "Or— if you buy into the notion that Wali Karzai was a corrupt warlord whose presence reduced the chance for progress in southern Afghanistan—his death could turn out to be a bloody blessing. No one knows yet." Max Fisher, Atlantic: He personifies the US entanglement in the war itself. "The things that make men like Ahmed Wali useful in the particular also make them burdensome in general. His power (is) inextricably linked with his corruption ... He was part of a system that fueled the war, and he helped us navigate that system while simultaneously worsening it." Reuters: The killing will likely set off a bloody power struggle to fill the leadership vacuum in Kandahar. "Regardless of whether they had a hand in the killing, the Taliban are likely to benefit from his death ." New York Times: The killing is bad news for Hamid Karzai, "who depended on his half brother’s unchallenged influence in southern Afghanistan to maintain the Karzai family’s nexus of connections to power brokers across the region, including tribal leaders, elected officials, narcotics smugglers and insurgents."