New Delhi: Afghan warlords, drug traffickers along with politicians made the most of the billions of dollars pumped in by the US in the 18-year-old war that led to a cesspool of corruption and extortion, ‘The Afghanistan Papers’ revealed by The Washington Post has said.
Such was the state of affairs that many Afghans started seeing the Taliban as “brutal but efficient and devout”.
The Post said that “dark money sloshed all around” and even top US officials were confused about how much money was being pumped into the hands of the warlords and others by various government agencies, including the CIA.
“Afghanistan’s largest bank liquefied into a cesspool of fraud. Travelers lugged suitcases loaded with $1 million, or more, on flights leaving Kabul,” the Post reported on the state of corruption in Afghanistan.
Mansions known as “poppy palaces” rose from the rubble to house opium kingpins thanks to the US which spent at least $1 trillion on the war. It is estimated that the actual cost would be more.
It took three years and two federal lawsuits for the Post to pry loose 2,000 pages of interview records
President Hamid Karzai, the US man in Afghanistan, won a re-election after cronies stuffed thousands of ballot boxes. He later admitted the CIA had delivered bags of cash to his office for years, calling it “nothing unusual”.
While President Barack Obama escalated the war and the Congress approved billions of additional dollars in support, the commander-in-chief and lawmakers promised to crack down on corruption and hold crooked Afghans accountable.
“In reality, U.S. officials backed off, looked away and let the thievery become more entrenched than ever,” according to a trove of confidential government interviews obtained by the daily.
The Post reported that many Afghans saw their government as incompetent and malicious.
“Judges, police and all manner of officeholders routinely subjected people to extortion. In contrast, Afghans often viewed the Taliban as brutal but efficient and devout,” it said.
Also read: 18 years, 2,300 deaths & $978 bn later, why America’s Afghan war is being called a failure
US supported worst Afghan offenders
Key figures in the war said Washington tolerated the worst offenders — warlords, drug traffickers, defence contractors — because they were allies of the US.
“But they said the U.S. government failed to confront a more distressing reality — that it was responsible for fueling the corruption, by doling out vast sums of money with limited foresight or regard for the consequences,” the Post said.
US officials were “so desperate to have the alcoholics to the table, we kept pouring drinks, not knowing [or] considering we were killing them”, an unnamed State Department official was quoted as saying in the documents.
To purchase loyalty and information, the CIA gave cash to warlords, governors, parliamentarians, even religious leaders, according to the interviews. The US military and other agencies also abetted corruption by doling out payments or contracts to unsavory Afghan power brokers in a misguided quest for stability, the Post said.
Gert Berthold, a forensic accountant who served on a military task force in Afghanistan during the height of the war, from 2010 to 2012, said he helped analyse 3,000 Defense Department contracts worth $106 billion to see who was benefiting.
The conclusion: About 40 per cent of the money ended up in the pockets of insurgents, criminal syndicates or corrupt Afghan officials.
“And it was often a higher percent,” Berthold told government interviewers. “We talked with many former [Afghan] ministers, and they told us, you’re under-estimating it.”
Fahim Khan, US ally in Afghanistan dreaded by officials
One such warlord was Mohammed Qasim Fahim Khan, a Tajik militia commander.
As leader of the Northern Alliance, Fahim Khan, who served as defence minister from 2001 to 2004 and later as the country’s first vice-president, played a key role in helping the US topple the Taliban in 2001.
In a ‘Lessons Learned’ interview, Ryan Crocker, who twice served as the top US diplomat in Kabul, said he held no illusions about Khan.
He recalled a bloodcurdling encounter with the defence minister in early 2002 when Khan nonchalantly informed him that another Afghan government minister had been murdered.
“He giggled while he related this,” Crocker said. “Later, much later, it emerged, I don’t know if it was ever verified or not, it emerged that Khan himself had the minister killed. But I certainly came out of those opening months with the feeling that even by Afghan standards, I was in the presence of a totally evil person.”
Khan died of natural causes in 2014. But the ambassador said he was still haunted by memories of the warlord.
Confusion about who was paying whom
In April 2002, then US Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld dictated a top-secret memo, ordering two senior aides to work with other US agencies to devise a plan for “how we are going to deal with each of these warlords — who is going to get money from whom, on what basis, in exchange for what, what is the quid pro quo, etc”.
“Let’s get on it,” he admonished.
Two months later, Rumsfeld sent a follow-up memo to Doug Feith, the Pentagon’s policy chief. “Is the DoD giving any food, weapons or money to any of the warlords or to Karzai? Is the CIA doing that? Is State doing it?” he wrote. “We need to get a sense of that balance.”
Also read: Treating Pakistan as a friend was a critical error: US officials in Afghanistan Papers
Saw a video clip, put out by Russia Today, where Mike Pompeo is saying, smilingly, I was CIA Director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. May have meant for a theatre other than Afghanistan. On a shrunken scale, but lots of unaudited funds must be flowing through our disturbed areas as well. Everyone loves a war / insurgency.