By Dave Anderson:
One of the larger inconsistencites in the US Afghanistan policy is that our counter-insurgency doctrine requires clean, competent, and non-corrupt local governance in order to build up local legitimacy while other government agencies are sponsoring, paying and protecting relevant local elites who are corrupt as hell. The Karzai government is corrupt as hell, his brother is one of the biggest private security contractors in the Pashtun south who is alleged to routinely stage ambushes to increase his fees, shake-down civilians, pay-off insurgents and attack other trucking companies. And he is safe from arrest.
The New York Times reports on another significant figure in the Karzai government who is corrupt as hell and is getting US protection for his corruption:
The aide to President Hamid Karzai
of Afghanistan
at the center of a politically sensitive corruption investigation is
being paid by the Central Intelligence Agency, according to Afghan
and American officials...Mohammed Zia Salehi, the chief of administration for the National
Security Council, appears to have been on the payroll for many years,
according to officials in Kabul and Washington....Mr. Salehi�s relationship with the C.I.A. underscores deep
contradictions at the heart of the Obama administration�s policy in
Afghanistan, with American officials simultaneously demanding that Mr.
Karzai root out the corruption that pervades his government while
sometimes subsidizing the very people suspected of perpetrating it...Mr. Salehi was arrested by the Afghan police after, investigators say,
they wiretapped him soliciting a bribe � in the form of a car for his
son � in exchange for impeding an American-backed investigation into a
company suspected of shipping billions of dollars out of the country for
Afghan officials, drug smugglers and insurgents...
The same set of contradictions played out in Iraq. Different US agencies have different agendas and they protected their assets on the ground from other US agencies, and other local interests to the advantage of the sponsor's objectives but to the detriment of the overall strategy.
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