CIA Attempts Old-Fashioned Party Building in Afghanistan

Matthew Rosenberg follows up his story from yesterday about the CIA leaving bags of cash at the Afghan presidential palace with a confirmation today by Hamid Karzai, "Afghan Leader Confirms Cash Deliveries by C.I.A.":

The C.I.A. money continues to flow, Mr. Karzai said Monday. “Yes, the office of national security has been receiving support from the United States for the past 10 years,” he told reporters in response to a question. “Not a big amount. A small amount, which has been used for various purposes.” He said the money was paid monthly. 

Afghan officials who described the payments before Monday’s comments from Mr. Karzai said the cash from the C.I.A. was basically used as a slush fund, similarly to the way the Iranian money was. Some went to pay supporters; some went to cover other expenses that officials would prefer to keep off the books, like secret diplomatic trips, officials have said. 

After Mr. Karzai’s statement on Monday, the presidential palace in Kabul said in a statement that the C.I.A. cash “has been used for different purposes, such as in operations, assisting wounded Afghan soldiers and paying rent.” The statement continued, “The assistance has been very useful, and we are thankful to them for it.” 

The C.I.A. payments open a window to an element of the war that has often gone unnoticed: the agency’s use of cash to clandestinely buy the loyalty of Afghans. The agency paid powerful warlords to fight against the Taliban during the 2001 invasion. It then continued paying Afghans to keep battling the Taliban and help track down the remnants of Al Qaeda. Mr. Karzai’s brother Ahmed Wali, who was assassinated in 2011, was among those paid by the agency, for instance. 

But the cash deliveries to Mr. Karzai’s office are of a different magnitude with a far wider impact, helping the palace finance the vast patronage networks that Mr. Karzai has used to build his power base. The payments appear to run directly counter to American efforts to clean up endemic corruption and encourage the Afghan government to be more responsive to the needs of its constituents.

It's clear what the CIA was/is trying to do. Politics is the art of the quid pro quo. And the ultimate quid pro quo medium is cash. As Jesse Unruh, the Speaker of the California State Assembly in the Golden State's heyday, famously said, "Money is the mother's milk of politics." The CIA was/is engaged in political formation, and the script it's following is fundamental; in this country we associate it with Tammany Hall.  And while "Tammany" might be a pejorative term, it is at root what politics is all about. It explains why 1% of the population controls politics in a democratic system of hundreds of millions of citizens. The 1% has most of the money.

Rosenberg can't resist taking a poke, in the story's final paragraph, at the claim that the CIA money was used to provide care for wounded soldiers:

Outside official circles, some Afghans offered a lighter take. “They make it sound as if it was a charity money dashed by a spy agency,” wrote Sayed Salahuddin, an Afghan journalist, on Twitter, referring to the palace statement that money had been used to help wounded soldiers. “They must have ‘treated’ many people.”