US Ghost Money Main Source for Corruption in Afghanistan

Local Editor

Tens of millions of US dollars in cash were delivered by the CIA in suitcases, backpacks and plastic shopping bags to the office of Afghan President Hamid Karzai for more than a decade.

The New York Times, cited current and former advisers to the Afghan leader.
"The ‘ghost money', meant to buy influence for the Central Intelligence Agency [CIA] but instead fuelled corruption and empowered warlords, undermining Washington's exit strategy from Afghanistan," the newspaper quoted US officials as saying.

"The biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan", one American official said, "was the United States."

The CIA declined to comment on the report and the US State Department did not immediately comment.
"We called it ‘ghost money'," Khalil Roman, who served as Karzai's chief of staff from 2002 until 2005, told the New York Times. "It came in secret and it left in secret."
For more than a decade the cash was dropped off every month or so at the Afghan president's office, the newspaper said.
Handing out cash has been standard procedure for the CIA in Afghanistan since the start of the war.

The cash payments to the president's office do not appear to be subject to oversight and restrictions placed on official American aid to the country or the CIA's formal assistance programs, like financing Afghan intelligence agencies, and do not appear to violate US laws, said the New York Times.

There was no evidence that Karzai personally received any of the money, Afghan officials told the newspaper. The cash was handled by his National Security Council, it added.

US and Afghan officials familiar with the payments were quoted as saying that the main goal in providing the cash was to maintain access to Karzai and his inner circle and to guarantee the CIA's influence at the presidential palace, which wields tremendous power in Afghanistan's highly centralized government.
Much of the money went to warlords and politicians, many with ties to the drug trade and in some cases the Taliban, the New York Times said.

US and Afghan officials were quoted as saying the CIA supported the same patronage networks that US diplomats and law enforcement agents struggled to dismantle, leaving the government in the grip of organized crime.

Source: NYT, Edited by moqawama.org