For more than a decade, the United States has been pouring millions of dollars into the offices of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, but there is little evidence that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has bought the influence it had sought from the Kabul government with its generous flows.
A report in The New York Times on Monday revealed that tens of millions of dollars packed into suitcases, backpacks and, on occasion, plastic shopping bags have flowed from the CIA to the office of President Karzai.
“We called it ‘ghost money’,” said Khalil Roman, who served as Karzai’s chief of staff from 2002 until 2005. “It came in secret, and it left in secret.”
The CIA has long been known to support some relatives and close aides of Karzai. But the new accounts of off-the-books cash delivered directly to his office show payments on a vaster scale, and with a far greater impact on everyday governing, the newspaper said.
“Moreover, there is little evidence that the payments bought the influence the CIA sought. Instead, some American officials said, the cash has fuelled corruption and empowered warlords, undermining Washington’s exit strategy from Afghanistan.”
“The biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan,” one American official said, “was the United States.”
The United States was not alone in delivering cash to the president. Karzai acknowledged a few years ago that Iran regularly gave bags of cash to one of his top aides.
At the time, in 2010, American officials jumped on the payments as evidence of an aggressive Iranian campaign to buy influence and poison Afghanistan’s relations with the United States. What they did not say was that the CIA was also plying the presidential palace with cash — and unlike the Iranians, it still is.
American and Afghan officials familiar with the payments said the agency’s main goal in providing the cash has been to maintain access to Karzai and his inner circle and to guarantee the agency’s influence at the presidential palace, which wields tremendous power in Afghanistan’s highly centralised government.
“It is not clear that the United States is getting what it pays for. Karzai’s willingness to defy the United States — and the Iranians, for that matter — on an array of issues seems to have only grown as the cash has piled up. Instead of securing his good graces, the payments may well illustrate the opposite: Karzai is seemingly unable to be bought.”
Over Iran’s objections, he signed a strategic partnership deal with the United States last year, directly leading the Iranians to halt their payments, two senior Afghan officials said. Now, the Kabul-datelined report disclosed that Karzai is seeking control over the Afghan militias raised by the CIA to target operatives of al Qaeda and insurgent commanders, potentially upending a critical part of the Obama administration’s plans for fighting militants as conventional military forces pull back this year.
But the CIA has continued to pay, believing it needs Karzai’s ear to run its clandestine war against al Qaeda and its allies, according to American and Afghan officials.
Like the Iranian cash, much of the CIA’s money goes to paying off warlords and politicians, many of whom have ties to the drug trade and, in some cases, the Taliban. The result, American and Afghan officials said, is that the agency has greased the wheels of the same patronage networks that American diplomats and law enforcement agents have struggled unsuccessfully to dismantle, leaving the government in the grips of what are basically organized crime syndicates.
“The cash does not appear to be subject to the oversight and restrictions placed on official American aid to the country or even the CIA’s formal assistance programmes, like financing Afghan intelligence agencies. And while there is no evidence that Karzai has personally taken any of the money — Afghan officials say the cash is handled by his National Security Council — the payments do in some cases work directly at odds with the aims of other parts of the American government in Afghanistan, even if they do not appear to violate American law.”
Handing out cash has been standard procedure for the CIA in Afghanistan since the start of the war. During the 2001 invasion, agency cash bought the services of numerous warlords, including Muhammad Qasim Fahim, the current first vice president.
“We paid them to overthrow the Taliban,” the American official said.
The CIA then kept paying the Afghans to keep fighting. For instance, Karzai’s half brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, was paid by the CIA to run the Kandahar Strike Force, a militia used by the agency to combat militants, until his assassination in 2011.
A number of senior officials on the Afghan National Security Council are also individually on the agency’s payroll, Afghan officials said.
The Times noted that while intelligence agencies often pay foreign officials to provide information, dropping off bags of cash at a foreign leader’s office to curry favour is a more unusual arrangement.
Afghan officials said the practice grew out of the unique circumstances in Afghanistan, where the United States built the government that Karzai runs. To accomplish that task, it had to bring to heel many of the warlords the CIA had paid during and after the 2001 invasion.
Payments ordinarily range from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars, the officials said, though none could provide exact figures. The money is used to cover a slew of off-the-books expenses, like paying off lawmakers or underwriting delicate diplomatic trips or informal negotiations.
Much of it also still goes to keeping old warlords in line. One is Abdul Rashid Dostum, an ethnic Uzbek whose militia served as a CIA proxy force in 2001. He receives nearly $100,000 a month from the palace, two Afghan officials said. Other officials said the amount was significantly lower.
Some of the cash also probably ends up in the pockets of the Karzai aides who handle it, Afghan and Western officials said, though they would not identify any by name.
That is not a significant concern for the CIA, said American officials familiar with the agency’s operations. “They’ll work with criminals if they think they have to,” one American former official said, according to the Times.
Interestingly, the cash from Tehran appears to have been handled with greater transparency than the dollars from the CIA, Afghan officials said. The Iranian payments were routed through Karzai’s chief of staff. Some of the money was deposited in an account in the president’s name at a state-run bank, and some was kept at the palace. The sum delivered would then be announced at the next cabinet meeting. The Iranians gave $3 million to well over $10 million a year, Afghan officials said.
When word of the Iranian cash leaked out in October 2010, Karzai told reporters that he was grateful for it. He then added, “The United States is doing the same thing. They are providing cash to some of our offices.”