The Great Afghan Bank Heist

By John Ballard

Dexter Filkins joined The New Yorker in 2011. A veteran foreign correspondent for the New York Times, he won the George Polk Award in 2004 for his reporting in Falluja and was part of a Times team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for work in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He is the author of �The Forever War,� which won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction. This is his first piece for The New Yorker.

Letter from Kabul: The Great Afghan Bank Heist, current issue The New Yorker.
Hold your nose and read the rest.
Better yet, ask your friends and neighbors if they are proud that US tax dollars and the lives of our kids are being invested in a good cause in Afghanistan.

Nine years into the American-led war, it�s no longer enough to say that corruption permeates the Afghan state. Corruption, by and large, is the Afghan state. On many days, it appears to exist for no other purpose than to enrich itself. Graft infests nearly every interaction between the Afghan state and its citizens, from the police officers who demand afghani notes to let cars pass through checkpoints to the members of Karzai�s government who were given land in the once empty quarter of Sherpur, now a neighborhood of grandiose splendor, where homes sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Bribes feed bribes: if an Afghan aspires to be a district police officer, he must often pay a significant amount, around fifty thousand dollars, to his boss, who is often the provincial police chief. He needs to earn back the money; hence the shakedown of ordinary Afghans. In this way, the Afghan government does not so much serve the people as it preys on them. Last year, Transparency International ranked Afghanistan the hundred-and-seventy-sixth most corrupt country out of a hundred and seventy-eight, surpassed only by Somalia and Myanmar. �It�s a vertically integrated criminal enterprise,� one American official told me.