Tue, Apr 30, 2013 page1

• CIA giving millions to office of Afghan president: advisers

  ‘GHOST MONEY’: The off-the-books cash is meant to ensure access to Hamid Karzai and his inner circle and to guarantee that the agency maintains influence

  • NY Times News Service, KABUL
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  For more than a decade, wads of US 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 CIA.

  All told, tens of millions of dollars have flowed from the CIA to the office of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, according to current and former advisers to the Afghan leader.

  “We called it ‘ghost money,”’ said Khalil Roman, who served as Karzai’s chief of staff from 2002 until 2005. “It came in secret, and it left in secret.”

  The CIA, which declined to comment for this article, has long been known to support some relatives and close aides of Karzai. However, 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 CIA sought. Instead, some US 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 US official said, “was the United States.”

  The US was not alone in delivering cash to the president. Karzai acknowledged a few years ago that Iran regularly gave bags of cash to one of his top aides.

  At the time, in 2010, US officials jumped on the payments as evidence of an aggressive Iranian campaign to buy influence and poison Afghanistan’s relations with the US. What they did not say was that the CIA was also plying the presidential palace with cash — and unlike the Iranians, it still is.

  US and Afghan officials familiar with the payments said the agency’s main goal in providing the cash has been to maintain access to 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 US is getting what it pays for. Karzai’s willingness to defy the US — 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: Karzai is seemingly unable to be bought.

  Over Iran’s objections, he signed a strategic partnership deal with the US last year, directly leading the Iranians to halt their payments, two senior Afghan officials said. Now, Karzai is seeking control over the Afghan militias raised by the CIA to target operatives of al-Qaeda and insurgent commanders, potentially upending a critical part of US President Barack Obama’s administration’s plans for fighting militants as conventional military forces pull back this year.

  However, the CIA has continued to pay, believing it needs Karzai’s ear to run its clandestine war against al-Qaeda and its allies, according to US and Afghan officials.
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