The first one comes courtesy of WikiLeaks the others from various other sources. Come to your own conclusions.
When Afghanistan's vice president visited the United Arab Emirates last year, local authorities working with the Drug Enforcement Administration discovered that he was carrying $52 million in cash. With wry understatement, a cable from the American Embassy in Kabul called the money "a significant amount" that the official, Ahmed Zia Massoud, "was ultimately allowed to keep without revealing the money's origin or destination.
The U.S. is spending more than
$2 billion a week in a country with a gross domestic product of about $14 billion a year The Wall Street Journal reported in June that more than $3 billion in cash has been openly flown out of Kabul International Airport in the past three years -- “packed into suitcases, piled onto pallets and loaded into airplanes.” Only so much of that could be drug money. The bulk, presumably, was skimmed from U.S. aid and logistics spending.
And that’s just what people are declaring. The Journal calculated the $3 billion figure based on Afghan customs records.The actual amount of money flown out of the country is, of course, higher. As the Journal noted: “One courier alone carried $2.3 billion between the second half of 2008 and the end of 2009.
An October report from the Senate Armed Services Committee came to the startling conclusion that the military’s hired guns are fueling the very insurgency the military is there to fight. The Committee's inquiry uncovered evidence of private security contractors funneling U.S. taxpayers dollars to Afghan warlords and strongmen linked to murder, kidnapping, bribery as well as Taliban and other anti-Coalition activities. The House Oversight Committee in June issued a massive report entitled "Warlord, Inc. Extortion and Corruption Along the U.S. Supply Chain in Afghanistan". The report culminated a six-month investigation into the Pentagon’s “Host Nation Trucking” (HNT) contract. It concluded that the $2.16 billion contract “fuels warlordism, extortion, and corruption, and it may be a significant source of funding for insurgents.” The contractors and their trucking subcontractors pay tens of millions of dollars annually to local warlords across Afghanistan in exchange for “protection.” Protection payments for safe passage are a significant potential source of funding for the Taliban.
The New York Times reported in October 2009 that “Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials.”
The United States is now spending nearly half a billion dollars a year in an attempt to establish the “rule of law” in Afghanistan. But according to a November report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, that may just be more money down the drain.
Transparency International’s annual corruption index last month ranked Afghanistan the second most corrupt country in the world, behind only Somalia.
