KABUL,
Afghanistan — For more than a decade, wads of American dollars packed
into suitcases, backpacks and, on occasion, plastic shopping bags have
been dropped off every month or so at the offices of Afghanistan’s
president — courtesy of the Central Intelligence Agency.
All told, tens of millions of dollars have flowed from the C.I.A. to the office of President Hamid Karzai, according to current and former advisers to the Afghan leader.
"We called it 'ghost money,’ " said Khalil Roman, who served as Mr.
Karzai’s deputy chief of staff from 2002 until 2005. "It came in secret,
and it left in secret."
The C.I.A., which declined to comment for this article, has long been known to support some relatives and close aides
of Mr. 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.
Moreover, there is little evidence that the payments bought the
influence the C.I.A. sought. Instead, some American officials said, the
cash has fueled 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. Mr.
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 C.I.A. 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
Mr. Karzai and his inner circle and to guarantee the agency’s influence
at the presidential palace, which wields tremendous power in
Afghanistan’s highly centralized government. The officials spoke about
the money only on the condition of anonymity.
It is not clear that the United States is getting what it pays for. Mr.
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: Mr. 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, Mr. Karzai is
seeking control over the Afghan militias raised by the C.I.A. 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 C.I.A. has continued to pay, believing it needs Mr. 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 C.I.A.’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 C.I.A.’s
formal assistance programs, like financing Afghan intelligence agencies.
And while there is no evidence that Mr. 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 C.I.A. 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 C.I.A. then kept paying the Afghans to keep fighting. For instance,
Mr. Karzai’s half brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, was paid by the C.I.A. 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.
While intelligence agencies often pay foreign officials to provide
information, dropping off bags of cash at a foreign leader’s office to
curry favor 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 Mr.
Karzai runs. To accomplish that task, it had to bring to heel many of
the warlords the C.I.A. had paid during and after the 2001 invasion.
By late 2002, Mr. Karzai and his aides were pressing for the payments to
be routed through the president’s office, allowing him to buy the
warlords’ loyalty, a former adviser to Mr. Karzai said.
Then, in December 2002, Iranians showed up at the palace in a sport
utility vehicle packed with cash, the former adviser said.
The C.I.A. began dropping off cash at the palace the following month,
and the sums grew from there, Afghan officials said.
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 C.I.A. 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.
Mr. Dostum, who declined requests for comment, had previously said he
was given $80,000 a month to serve as Mr. Karzai’s emissary in northern
Afghanistan. "I asked for a year up front in cash so that I could build
my dream house," he was quoted as saying in a 2009 interview with Time magazine.
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 C.I.A., 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.
Interestingly, the cash from Tehran appears to have been handled with
greater transparency than the dollars from the C.I.A., Afghan officials
said. The Iranian payments were routed through Mr. 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, Mr. 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."
At the time, Mr. Karzai’s aides said he was referring to the billions in
formal aid the United States gives. But the former adviser said in a
recent interview that the president was in fact referring to the
C.I.A.’s bags of cash.
No one mentions the agency’s money at cabinet meetings. It is handled by
a small clique at the National Security Council, including its
administrative chief, Mohammed Zia Salehi, Afghan officials said.
Mr. Salehi, though, is better known for being arrested in 2010 in
connection with a sprawling, American-led investigation that tied
together Afghan cash smuggling, Taliban finances and the opium trade.
Mr. Karzai had him released within hours, and the C.I.A. then helped
persuade the Obama administration to back off its anticorruption push,
American officials said.
After his release, Mr. Salehi jokingly came up with a motto that
succinctly summed up America’s conflicting priorities. He was, he began
telling colleagues, "an enemy of the F.B.I., and a hero to the C.I.A."
