WORLD NEWS

WASHINGTON: Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the embattled Afghan president and a suspected drug trafficker, has been on the CIA payroll for most of the past eight years, The New York Times reported Tuesday.

The US spy agency pays Karzai for a variety of services, the newspaper said, such as fielding recruits for an Afghan paramilitary force operating at the CIA's direction in and around his home city of Kandahar, a Taliban stronghold. He also helps the CIA contact and sometimes meet Taliban followers.

Karzai, who is said to have ties to Afghanistan's lucrative illegal opium trade, has a "wide-ranging" relationship with the CIA, the Times said, citing US officials.