CIA Pays Millions to Afghan Puppet Regime

CIA Pays Millions to Afghan Puppet Regime.

by Mahmoud Abu Ghosh

Tens of millions of United States dollars in cash were delivered by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in suitcases, backpacks and plastic shopping bags to the office of Afghan President Hamid Karzai for more than a decade, according to a New York Times report citing current and former advisers to the Afghan leader.

The so-called “ghost money” was meant to buy influence for the CIA but instead fueled 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. The New York Times did not publish any comment from Karzai or his office.

“We called it ‘ghost money’,” Khalil Roman, who served as Karzai’s chief of staff from 2002 until 2005, told the 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 Western-backed president’s office, the newspaper said.

Handing out cash has been standard procedure for the CIA in Afghanistan since the start of the American-led invasion and subsequent occupation in late 2001.

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 program, like financing Afghan intelligence agencies, and do not appear to violate US laws, said the 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 even resistance groups like the Taliban, the 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.

In 2010, Karzai said his office received cash in bags from Iran, but that it was a transparent form of aid that helped cover expenses at the presidential palace. He said at the time that the United States made similar payments.

The latest Times report said much of the Iranian cash, like the CIA money, went to pay warlords and politicians.

For most of Karzai’s 11-year reign, there has been little interest in anti-corruption in the army or police. The country’s two most powerful institutions receive billions of dollars from donors annually but struggle just to recruit and maintain a force bled by high rates of desertion.

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