1. Former Functions:
Chairman, President and Founder of NCL HOLDINGS, LLC 1356 BEVERLY RD STE 210 MCLEAN VA 221013842 USA,

2. Previous Functions:
Wardak worked in mergers and acquisitions at Merrill Lynch in New York and Palo Alto, California, Managing Director for International Operations with Technologists, Inc. (2004-2005),
Businessman making Millions of U.S. $ supplying the Afghan National Army with hardware,

3. Biodata:
Hamid Wardak Hamed Wardak Hamat Wardakwas born 1977 in Kabul, Afghanistan and grew up in Pakistan and the United States. He is the son of the afghan Defense Minister Wardak. He speaks Dari and Pashto and lives between Washington, DC and Kabul. Visited Georgetown University in 1997, where he earned a BA in Government and Political Theory.
 

From 2004-2005, Wardak was a Managing Director for International Operations with Technologists, Inc., an US Government contractor that became active in Afghanistan under his leadership. In that role he generated $44 million in design-build contracts in Afghanistan through his business development efforts with USAID and the Department of Defense, exponentially increasing the company’s annual revenue of $1 million. In 2002-2003, he was the Afghan Finance Minister’s (Ashraf Ghanis) Private Envoy to the United States. * Early in his career, Wardak worked in mergers and acquisitions at Merrill Lynch in New York and Palo Alto, California. His assignments ranged in value from $200 million to $1 billion, and included Avaya’s acquisition of VPNET and Veeco Instruments’ acquisition of Applied Epi. Hamid Wardak is listed as one of the board members of a new pressure group, the Campaign for a U.S.-Afghanistan Partnership (“CUSAP”) which describes itself as "a membership organization of U.S. and Afghan citizens". CUSAP has already been quite active in D.C., employing lobbyists Patton Boggs LLP to make their case that "Afghanistan, through a long-term partnership with the United States, can become a strong, prospering nation." It's main lobbyist, Nicholas W.Allard, is a well-connected D.C. insider - he was previously chief of staff to Senator Pat Moynihan.

According to OpenSecrets.Org, CUSAP has already spent $190,000 on lobbying in its short existence but, oddly, there's no physical address for given on its website - and its published paper apparently refers enquiries to junior lobbyists at Patton Boggs. Perhaps that apparent penchant for secrecy comes from Wardak's colleague at CUSAP, the co-founder Milt Bearden. He retired from the CIA in 1994, but before that he was the man responsible for Operation Cyclone - the program to arm the mujahedeen during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Wardak and Bearden knew each other already, though.

Hamid Wardak is also CEO and President of a company called NCL Holdings. On the company website, NHL Holdings describe their business: "NCL has been tasked to provide all resources including logistics support and management necessary to provide transportation support for the secure long haul distribution of reconstruction, security, and life support assets from Forward Operating Bases (FOB) and distribution sites located throughout the Afghanistan Theater of Operations." NCL belongs to Hamid Wardak, the son of Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak. Hamid is founder, chairman and CEO of NCL Holdings, which includes logistics and security operations. The permit for NCL has been issued to Najib Wardak, a former security commander in Baghlan province and a U.S. citizen. Hamid Wardak is in the U.S. and has been vehemently criticizing President Karzais policies, he says he has started a party called Fidayane Sulh (which translates as Sacrificing for Peace). When we saw Najib Wardak, he said he had quit his job with NCL and had not even received his 10 percent share from the company. (20100823) Bearden is listed as being on the advisory board of NCL Holdings. As is Elliot F Gearsen, Finance Director for the Joe Lieberman for President Campaign 2004. Those are the only two advisors.

The business connection between the Afghan defense minister's son and an ex-CIA man who armed the mujahedeen is interesting, given the NYT's report about Karzai's brother, especially since a scholarly report seems to have identified Hamid Wardak as allegedly one of the warlords running unregistered security forces that the U.S. has to deal with. But it might be purely coincidental, signifying nothing untoward. However, that the defense minister's son and the ex-CIA guy are involved in a business that makes lots of money from the U.S. military's continued presence in Afghanistan while simultaneously running a camapign to boost for a continued U.S. military presence in Afghanistan - and spending pots of money on lobbyists under that campaign's banner - might well be construed as a major conflict of interest.

Hamid Wardak, the Bush Administration the afghan US Expat Mafia: At issue is a web of political influence, backed by enormous sums of US military and humanitarian aid dollars, extending from the White House through an array of government officials, neo-conservative outriders and avaricious Afghan-American businessmen. Afghans and foreign observers who’ve witnessed the web’s growth describe it as a network of aggressive political adventurers, hungry for influence and lucrative development contracts. “These people have hijacked a weak system,” says a senior member of President Hamid Karzai’s staff, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “People here initially welcomed diaspora Afghans with open arms and looked to them for guidance. But that’s changed. It’s clear that too many Afghan-Americans paraded their patriotism only to promote their careers, or to advance ethnic agendas, or just to fill their pockets. On top of that, their scheming has distorted policy in Washington, a lot like Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress at the start of the Iraq war. “It doesn’t matter who Karzai appoints as Interior Minister or Attorney General,” the source says. “That’s just the visible surface. What really matters is who’s making deals behind the scenes, at the US Embassy or over a cosy meal at the Presidential Palace.”

Member of Parliament Ramazan Bashar Dost says: “The United States and other western countries are not following their own laws. It is obvious to everyone that the contracts go to a minister's son or brother. You cannot get a contract unless you have connections.” Across town from parliament stands an institution that attests to that charge: the Karzai regime’s Ministry of Defence. Ask to meet the minister, Rahim Wardak, and you’ll be referred to a public affairs desk at the American Embassy. Ask to meet the beneficiaries of the Afghan army building boom, and you’ll be invited to leave.

But regime insiders will happily recite the names - with Minister Wardak’s son, Hamed, at the top of the list. In the 1990’s, a new generation of displaced Afghans, the sons and daughters of diplomats, businessmen - and former guerrilla commanders - took root in their parents’ adopted homeland. It was within this diaspora that Hamed Wardak came of age. A somewhat chubby, intensely studious young man, Hamed was destined to emulate, if not exceed, Zalmay Khalilzad’s gifts for political networking and hyper-drive careerism. Hamed’s father, Rahim Wardak, brought his family to the U.S. from Pakistan. There, in the 1980’s, he had garnered a reputation as one of the least accomplished commanders of the American-backed Mujahideen resistance to Soviet occupation forces. By the time of the 1990’s civil war, Rahim Wardak had vanished from the Afghan scene. Bizarrely, his young son, Hamed, would help ignite Rahim Wardak’s unlikely comeback. At Georgetown University, Hamed wrote his senior thesis under the mentorship of Jeane Kirkpatrick, formerly Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to the UN, and the godmother of the neo-conservative movement. Graduating in 1997, Hamed won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford. During this period, he flirted with pro-Taliban sympathies, due both to his ethnic Pashtun fervour and peer pressure from young DC-area extremists.

Gradually, however, Hamed came under the influence of Kirkpatrick’s philosophical soul mates, notably Marin Strmecki, a Republican essayist and political facilitator with the Smith Richardson Foundation. Strmecki worked at the Pentagon under Dick Cheney in the first Bush administration, along with Lewis “Scooter” Libby – and Zalmay Khalilzad. It was during Hamed Wardak’s reappraisal of the world, via these American political heavyweights, that he came into contact with a group of upwardly-mobile players on Washington’s Afghan-American scene: the Karzais - specifically, two of the six Karzai boys – Qayum and Mahmood. Unlike their younger brother Hamid, who had spent much of his life in Pakistan, Mahmood and Qayum were accomplished US-based businessmen. The brothers recognized a bright prospect in the young Rhodes Scholar.

In turn, Wardak saw the benefits of aligning himself with the Karzais’ dazzling circle of friends. This paid enormous dividends. By the time war drums sounded in the aftermath of the Sept. 11th terror attacks, Hamed Wardak had toned down his pro-Taliban sympathies and was on his way to becoming vice-president of the Afghan-American Chamber of Commerce, founded by Mahmood Karzai. He also nabbed an advisor’s post with Karzai’s first Finance Minister, Ashraf Ghani.

But his real breakthrough was joining a Virginia-based contracting firm, Technologists Inc., founded by Aziz Azimi, a close friend of Qayum Karzai. Hamed Wardak’s new alliances proved extraordinarily advantageous as George W. Bush launched his “war on terror,” particularly with Khalilzad and Strmecki enjoying direct access to vice-president Dick Cheney’s office. The melding of the Wardaks’ business and political connections had catapulted them into the front ranks of an advancing legion of state-building, doctrine-spouting capitalists.

Along with the leading lights of the Afghan-American business community, they returned to their ancestral homeland, which had become a cradle of treasure and influence few Afghans could have dreamed of after the displacement and loss of the Soviet and Taliban eras. On the policy front, members of Khalilzad’s coterie, notably Marin Strmecki and Martin Hoffman, a former college roommate of Donald Rumsfeld, stepped up their efforts to Pashtunize the Karzai regime. Strmecki had already taken the campaign to the op-ed pages of American newspapers, alleging that the Tajik-led Northern Alliance was plotting against both the Karzai government and former King Zahir Shah. By the time Khalilzad took up his ambassadorship to Kabul in Dec. 2004, Strmecki had been appointed Rumsfeld’s “Afghanistan Policy Co-ordinator.”

That same month, Karzai removed his Minister of Defence, the Northern Alliance’s Mohammed Fahim, a Tajik. Faim’s replacement: Rahim Wardak. Meanwhile, Khalilzad assembled a team of Afghan-American consultants, technocrats and publicists within the bunker-like precincts of the US Embassy, some on salaries of $200,000 or more. This group had direct links with Washington, where they enjoyed an additional back-channel fixer and communicator, the Karzai regime’s Afghan-American Ambassador, Said Jawad. Within Khalilzad’s makeshift provisional authority in Kabul, he championed a creation called the Afghanistan Reconstruction Group. ARG achieved two cherished goals for the administration: putting a select group of loyal American and Afghan-American business hawks in charge of U.S.-funded development projects and doing so while completely by-passing the State Department.

In the minds of Cheney, Rumsfeld and Khalilzad, State was a haven of resistance to the neo-conservative cause. ARG reported directly to the Department of Defense, specifically to Rumsfeld’s office. State Department officials bristled at being cut out of decision-making on ARG’s high-cost projects, but could do little other than watch this feverish new phase of the gold rush in Afghan aid. Marin Strmecki joined ARG’s board, while Louis Hughes, a former president of the Lockheed Martin Corporation, took the helm. According to officials close to Karzai’s office, Khalilzad pressed USAID, the government’s main overseas aid agency, to grant contracts to the administration’s approved list of Afghan-Americans. Several USAID officers who resisted Khalilzad were replaced.

The ARG brain trust proudly boasted its intent to: “apply its private-sector experience and expertise” in rebuilding Afghanistan, “given current US advocacy of market economy, citizen self-determination, and democracy…” In practice, the group was more about self-service than self-determination, according to one former USAID official, who requested transfer from Kabul after several bruising encounters with Khalilzad and his ARG clients. “We had all these people shuttling in from D.C., lecturing everyone about their Afghan-American credentials. They used all the buzz words – democracy, helping the Afghan people. But it was more about them monopolizing the flow of information from Kabul to Washington, and landing contracts.”

According to another US official who fought in vain to prevent the shift: “The justification was streamlining, because so many construction projects were for the Afghan military, and they were ultimately the Pentagon’s babies. But there was an immediate loss of transparency and accountability. That’s just how the Department of Defense does business.”

During this period, Hamed Wardak’s Washington DC-based firm, Technologists Inc. (Ti), benefited from several large contracts, some arranged directly with the US Defense Department, others via the Afghan Ministry of Defence. Ti’s website boasts that it was the first Afghan-American firm to be awarded a prime contract by the US government. Its portfolio has been fattened by a cornucopia of construction projects, including border crossing stations and the ANA’s Logistics and Command Headquarters, a counter-narcotics “campus” where the US Drug Enforcement Agency and its Afghan counterparts will be based, cell block renovations to Kabul’s huge Pul-i-Charkhi prison, and three industrial parks.

Ti’s president, Aziz Azimi, allows that the projects have brought at least $100 million in contracts to his firm. He admits to meeting Khalilzad twice in Kabul, but says that his projects were not obtained through ARG. As for Hamed Wardak, he left the company in 2006. Currently, Azizi says, “I don’t have any kind of dealings with him.” Regarding past deals: “I have not gained any of my contracts from Mr. Wardak’s father, because he was not the minister when I got there (Afghanistan). “You’re welcome to take any company out there, and put their numbers against mine,” Azimi says. “In terms of value and return, I have a very clear conscience. I welcome anyone to come in and look at my books. I have nothing to hide, nothing to be afraid of.”

Hamed Wardak could not be located for his response to this story. Azimi says he does not know the whereabouts of his former “Managing Director of International Operations,” and Wardak’s name has been removed from Ti’s website. Wardak reportedly has set up his own company, NCL, in Kabul, along with a foundation called “Sacrificers For Peace,” described as a “multi-ethnic movement” seeking “governmental reform.” The name prompts a wry smile from the source in President Karzai’s office. “The Afghan people know who has made genuine sacrifices – their own families, their villages, their country. Afghans know the meaning of the word sacrifice. And they know too well about those who only pretend to be concerned, while getting rich on foreign aid.”

Hamed Wardak reportedly arrested — search reqs suggest FBI picked him up in Baltimore… Also detained: Asadullah Ramin, brother of a former Cabinet minister, and a brother of Hamidullah Farooqi, former Transport Minister. [Source: Daily Arman-e-Milli] Is this Stateside activity of FBI’s Afghan Major Crimes Task Force? (MCTF) (20100902)

An American fashion model, Sarah Goolden, claims that son of a former Afghan defense minister stalked and raped her after she rejected him, the New York Post reported.(20190721)

He speaks Pashtu, Urdu and English