Afghanistan’s Corruption, and America’s Too

In the unforgiving Afghan landscape, we have learned that you can’t buy a warlord. You can only rent one. We owe this education to our man in Kabul, President Hamid Karzai.

For more than a decade, it has been recently confirmed, U.S. dollars packed into suitcases, backpacks and plastic shopping bags have been delivered every month or so to Karzai’s office. “We called it ‘ghost money,’” Khalil Roman, who served as the Afghan president’s deputy chief of staff from 2002 until 2005, told the New York Times. “It came in secret, and it left in secret.”