Karzai Confirms Bribes/Ghost Money

[BarakzaiAbdali]

How utterly bereft of ethics is this man?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/0...n_3176956.html

He is like the Boss Tweed of Kabul

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CIA Bribes Karzai: Millions In 'Ghost Money' Paid To Afghanistan President's Office, New York Times Reports

April 29 (Reuters) - Tens of millions of U.S. dollars in cash were delivered by the CIA in suitcases, backpacks and plastic shopping bags to the office of Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai for more than a decade, the New York Times says, citing current and former advisers to the Afghan leader.

The so-called "ghost money" was 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 New York Times. "It came in secret and it left in secret."

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.

In response to the report, Karzai told reporters in Helsinki after a meeting with Finnish leaders that the office of the National Security Council had been receiving support from the U.S. government for the past 10 years. He said the amounts had been "not big" and the funds were used for various purposes including assistance for the wounded.

"It's multi-purpose assistance," he said, without commenting on the report's claims the funds fuelled corruption and empowered warlords.

However, Afghan Foreign Ministry spokesman Janan Mosazai told reporters in Kabul that there was no proof or evidence to back up the claims in the story.

For more than a decade the cash was dropped off every month or so at the Afghan president's office, the New York Times 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 programmes, like financing Afghan intelligence agencies, and do not appear to violate U.S. laws, said the New York Times.

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

Nahid Fareed, a member of parliament from western Herat province, who usually supports Karzai's government, said the claims in the story represented a "serious issue".

"Any hidden money that the palace receives from indirect channels, such as spy agencies, notably the CIA, is against national interest and is treason," Fareed told Reuters.

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 New York 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. (Additional reporting by Alistair Bell and Sarah Lynch in Washington; Hamid Shalizi and Mirwais Harooni in Kabul; Writing by Michael Perry; Editing by Mark Bendeich and Neil Fullick)

[DaZahroJaam.]

[khushal]

here is billy's take on it:
Afghanistan ,Corruption ,Getting Cash from " C.I.A.& Iran " ! - YouTube

[khushal]

CIA buys trouble in Afghanistan

CIA buys trouble in Afghanistan

By SARAH CHAYES - Los Angeles Times
By SARAH CHAYES Los Angeles Times


In a time when the whetted and arbitrary deficit-reduction knife is cutting bone out of critical U.S. government programs, the image of shopping bags stuffed with CIA cash handed off on a monthly basis to Afghan President Hamid Karzai - who reigns over one of the most corrupt governments on the planet - has outraged many Americans.
The New York Times, which revealed the years of payoffs this week, noted that "there is little evidence the payments bought the influence the CIA sought."
In fact, regular cash handouts of this type may do the opposite. They may well have enabled Karzai's frequent and theatrical outbursts against U.S. officials and policies, not to mention his collusion with some of his country's most corrupt and abusive officials. Such payoffs signal to Karzai - or other leaders like him - that he enjoys the unwavering support of the CIA, no matter what he does or says, and embolden him to thumb his nose at the United States whenever he feels like it.





Karzai's relationship with the CIA is believed to long predate the tense days in late 2001 when CIA officers joined him and his followers in the mountains north of Kandahar as the Taliban regime was falling. In a 2003 conversation, the most renowned commander of anti-Soviet resistance fighters in southern Afghanistan, where I lived at the time, told me that in the late 1980s Karzai introduced him to CIA officials so he could obtain some of the all-important Stinger missiles that helped the Afghan fighters neutralize Soviet helicopters. U.S. support of the anti-Soviet resistance was covert. Very few Afghans had direct contact with the CIA. Most received U.S. money or military equipment by way of Pakistani intermediaries. Karzai, according to this commander, was one of the early exceptions.
Given this long relationship with the CIA, Karzai may believe that the agency somehow represents the true voice of the U.S. government. Indeed, the competing and often contradictory exhortations and demands transmitted by ambassadors and special envoys who come and go, the successive commanders of international forces with their different approaches, the congressional delegations who troop through his office, even secretaries of state or defense, must start to sound like a lot of cacophonous noise to the man on the receiving end. Amid the din, CIA money can ring a clear note.
The tendency to read CIA signals as conveying the "real" intent of the U.S. government is not limited to Afghan leaders. In his book "The Arab Center," for example, former Jordanian Foreign Minister Marwan Muasher describes a tense episode in 2004 when Jordan was promoting a broad-based Arab initiative to break the deadlock in the Middle East peace process.
A meeting between President George W. Bush and King Abdullah II was hanging in the balance, with the king awaiting the result of fraught negotiations between Muasher and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice over the contents of a letter of intent from Bush to Abdullah. A full day of talks resulted in a mutually agreeable formulation.
But in the meantime, a CIA official had been speaking back channel with Jordan's intelligence chief, waiting on the West Coast with the king; the CIA official urged the delegation to fly home to Jordan, and it did. In the end, the king and his advisers concluded that it was the CIA, not the national security adviser, that really counted in the U.S. government, and the Middle East peace process remained stalled.
In Karzai's case, CIA payments, against a backdrop of jangling dissonance, may allow him to choose which messages to take seriously - usually the ones he likes. Or to play some U.S. actors off against others, as he recently did by subjecting Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to public humiliation while courting Secretary of State John Kerry.
Many Afghans I know had assumed for years that the CIA was doling out cash to Karzai. Even so, the U.S. media expose has made waves, providing evidence for what had only been suspected.
"No wonder he talks so badly against the United States," one friend said, summarizing the reactions he'd heard. "The cash, on top of everything else America has done for him, just proves how desperately you need him. It means he can do anything."
This can hardly be the only time the CIA has covertly paid off key foreign leaders, with little if any coordination with other U.S. decision-makers and little understanding of the repercussions. Such activities amount to an independent foreign policy, lacking connection to any concerted plan, and too often conflict with the U.S. government's wider priorities. It is time, in this as in other domains, to inject some accountability and oversight into CIA operations.
ABOUT THE WRITER
Sarah Chayes, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment, lived in Afghanistan for most of the last decade and served as special assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. She wrote this for the Los Angeles Times.

Read more here: CIA buys trouble in Afghanistan - National voices - MercedSun-Star.com