Hamid Karzai, the incumbent president, has been declared the winner of Afghanistan’s presidential election.Afghanistan’s election panel announced the decision on Monday after a runoff planned for November 7 was cancelled.

Karzai would have been the only candidate after his rival, Abdullah Abdullah, withdrew a day earlier.

Abdullah Abdullah cited the government’s refusal to make changes in the electoral commission.

Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials.

The agency pays Mr. Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home.

At this point, everything about the U.S. policy toward the Afghan drug trade — from tolerance to eradication during the Bush administration to an evolving approach to cultivating alternatives — now ought to be questioned. As in questioned in open congressional session. CIA money funds a politically connected drug dealer. Opium funds the Taliban. We are in Afghanistan to fight the Taliban. How much CIA money has indirectly funded the Taliban? [more]