Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai, second left, inspects the ceremonial guard of honor on the occasion of Eid al-Adha at the Presidential Palace mosque in Kabul, Afghanistan, Friday, Nov. 27, 2009. Eid al-Adha is a religious festival celebrated by Muslims worldwide. (THE ASSOCIATED PRESS/Mustafa Quraishi)

TORONTO - Corruption infecting the Afghan government's highest levels, coupled with unhelpful Western meddling along the way, crippled efforts to effectively battle the country's burgeoning opium trade, says the country's former counter-narcotics minister.

Speaking at length for the first time since he abruptly resigned his post two years ago, Habibullah Qaderi said an increasing sense of isolation drove him to quit Hamid Karzai's cabinet and take up the position of consulate-general in Toronto.

"I've never been supported by the international community; I was not supported by my own government," Qaderi told The Canadian Press.

"I never felt I was supported by anybody. That will automatically make you ill."

Qaderi led Afghanistan's counter-narcotics charge from January 2004 until he resigned in July 2007 - a move that came amid a record poppy harvest, and which officials at the time attributed to health concerns.

Some critics branded Qaderi ineffective and incompetent as head of the fledgling ministry; a whisper campaign also linked him to money laundering - a "bogus" allegation that still hurts, he said.

In a wide-ranging interview in his Toronto office, Qaderi took aim at the malignant corruption he said infected the government and metastasized throughout the insurgency-racked country. His best efforts to draw attention to the problem were stymied, he said, both internally and by the international community.

In some cases, he said, international intelligence agencies such as the CIA persisted in supporting officials they knew to be dishonest because it served their own purposes.

Those agents are "thriving" under the protection of foreign services, he said.

"In my day, in high levels, there were people who were corrupt - those people are still in those posts," Qaderi said.

"Corrupt people are corrupt people. The day they become part of the Afghan government, the damage is much higher. It's not controllable."

As minister, Qaderi's days consisted of moving from his barricaded, darkened home to a bulletproof car with tinted windows, then to a heavily fortified office - all amid the constant fear of attack.

It was a daunting challenge the Kandahar-born mechanical engineer said he would have accepted had he been able to see light at the end of the tunnel.

"As far as the corruption is concerned, it continues," Qaderi said. "I am part of the same government. I feel ashamed sometimes."

Still, Qaderi defended Afghanistan's oft-maligned president, saying he does not believe Karzai himself is corrupt. Karzai's brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, has strenuously denied allegations in recent media reports that he is both involved in the narco-trade and on the CIA payroll.

Part of the battle Qaderi said he faced in Kabul was the lack of investigative systems to collect hard evidence against suspects, leaving only "verbal proof" of wrongdoing. He said his pleas to British officials leading the anti-narcotics fight for systems to track property or intercept communications were met with little more than unfulfilled promises.

Qaderi said he turned down an interview with CBS's "60 Minutes" to talk about high-level corruption and drug trafficking because he didn't think it would make a difference.

"It is futile to talk about something that is not going to change," he said.

Despite his bleak assessment, Qaderi said he is pinning hopes on Karzai and Western pressure to tackle the rot and the "culture of impunity," which he said has destroyed confidence Afghans had in their governments or the international community.

"Things have fallen apart. It would have been much easier three to four years back than now," he said. "But it is still possible. We still have time."

The ministry he set up has finally begun to have some effect and poppies are no longer an issue in more than a dozen of the country's 34 provinces, he said.

During Qaderi's fight against the narco-industry, British and American forces flip-flopped on poppy eradication efforts, in part to avoid alienating impoverished farmers. One non-governmental organization even told farmers they had a right to grow the crop, he said.

"I was telling them not to grow. They were telling them to grow."

Also, many foreign contractors enriched themselves at the multibillion-dollar trough of international aid at the expense of ordinary Afghans, he alleged.

Private contractors charged $19,000 to eradicate a hectare of poppies - enough to buy the land itself three times over - while the Afghan government was given about $120 for the same purpose.

"We could have done much better," he said. "(The money) was not spent in the right way."