THE AFGHANISTAN PAPERS Part 4: Consumed by corruption More stories THE AFGHANISTAN PAPERS A secret history of the war CONSUMED BY CORRUPTION The U.S. flooded the country with money — then turned a blind eye to the graft it fueled By Craig Whitlock Dec. 9, 2019 bout halfway into the 18-year war, Afghans stopped hiding how corrupt their country had become. THE AFGHANISTAN PAPERS Part 4: Consumed by corruption More stories A Dark money sloshed all around. Afghanistan’s largest bank liquefied into a cesspool of fraud. Travelers lugged suitcases loaded with $1 million, or THE AFGHANISTAN PAPERS Part 4: Consumed by corruptionmore, on flights leaving Kabul. More stories KABUL, 20122006 (Yuri(Gary Kozyrev/Noor) Knight/VII/Redux) Mansions known as “poppy palaces” rose from the rubble to house opium kingpins. THE AFGHANISTAN PAPERS Part 4: Consumed by corruptionPresident Hamid Karzai won reelection after cronies stuffed thousands of More stories ballot boxes. He later admitted the CIA had delivered bags of cash to his office for years, calling it “nothing unusual.” In public, as President Barack Obama escalated the war and Congress approved billions of additional dollars in support, the commander in chief and lawmakers promised to crack down on corruption and hold crooked Afghans accountable. In reality, U.S. officials backed off, looked away and let the thievery become more entrenched than ever, according to a trove of confidential government interviews obtained by The Washington Post. In the interviews, key figures in the war said Washington tolerated the worst offenders — warlords, drug traffickers, defense contractors — because they were allies of the United States. But they said the U.S. government failed to confront a more distressing reality — that it was responsible for fueling the corruption, by doling out vast sums of money with limited foresight or regard for the consequences. Click any underlined text in the story to see the statement in the original document U.S. officials were “so desperate to have the alcoholics to the table, we kept pouring drinks, not knowing [or] considering we were killing them,” an unnamed State Department official told government interviewers. The scale of the corruption was the unintended result of swamping the war zone with far more aid and defense contracts than impoverished Afghanistan could absorb. There was so much excess, financed by American taxpayers, that opportunities for bribery and fraud became almost limitless, according to the interviews. “The basic assumption was that corruption is an Afghan problem and we are the solution,” Barnett Rubin, a former senior State Department adviser and a New York University professor, told government interviewers. “But there is one indispensable ingredient for corruption — money — and we were the ones who had the money.” To purchase loyalty and information, the CIA gave cash to warlords, governors, parliamentarians, even religious leaders, according to the interviews. The U.S. military and other agencies also abetted corruption by doling out payments or contracts to unsavory Afghan power brokers in a misguided quest for stability. “We had partnerships with all the wrong players,” a senior U.S. diplomat told government interviewers. “The U.S. is still standing shoulder-to- shoulder with these people, even through all these years. It’s a case of security trumping everything else.” Gert Berthold, a forensic accountant who served on a THE military task force in Afghanistan during the height of AFGHANISTAN PAPERS the war, from 2010 to 2012, said he helped analyze 3,000 Defense Department contracts worth See the documents More $106 billion to see who was benefiting. than 2,000 pages of interviews and memos reveal a secret THE AFGHANISTAN PAPERS Part 4: Consumed by corruption The conclusion: About 40 percent of the money ended More stories history of the war. up in the pockets of insurgents, criminal syndicates or Part 5: Unguarded nation Why the effort to train Afghan corrupt Afghan officials. security forces was mission impossible. “And it was often a higher percent,” Berthold told Responses to The Post from government interviewers. “We talked with many people named in The Afghanistan Papers former [Afghan] ministers, and they told us, you’re under-estimating it.” Berthold said the evidence was so damning that few U.S. officials wanted to hear about it. “No one wanted accountability,” he said. “If you’re going to do anti- corruption, someone has got to own it. From what I’ve seen, no one is willing to own it.” WHAT THEY SAID IN PRIVATE Aug. 24, 2015 “We used the bad guys to get the badder guys. We [thought we] could circle back and get the bad guys later, only we never did.” — USAID official, Lessons Learned interview he interviews were conducted between 2014 and 2018 by the T Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR. The agency was created by Congress to investigate fraud and waste, but it used the interviews for a special project, titled “Lessons Learned,” to diagnose policy failures from the war. In September 2016, SIGAR published a 164-page report that chronicled how corruption had harmed the U.S. mission in Afghanistan and that made recommendations for tackling the problem. “The U.S. government should take into account the amount of assistance a host country can absorb, and agencies should improve their ability to effectively monitor this assistance,” the report stated. “U.S. strategies and plans should incorporate anticorruption objectives into security and stability goals, rather than viewing anticorruption as imposing trade-offs on those goals.” But the Lessons Learned report about corruption omitted the names of the vast majority of those who were interviewed, as well as the most unsparing criticisms about how Washington was at fault. The Post sued SIGAR in federal court — twice — to force it to release the interview records under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). THE AFGHANISTAN PAPERS Part 4: Consumed by corruptionThe documents make clear that the seeds of runaway corruption were More stories planted at the outset of the war. According to the interviews, the CIA, the U.S. military, the State Department and other agencies used cash and lucrative contracts to win the allegiance of Afghan warlords in the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Intended as a short-term tactic, the practice ended up binding the United States to some of the country’s most notorious figures for years. Mohammed Qasim Fahim Khan in 2002. Behind him is a banner of Ahmed Shah Massoud, a legendary anti-Taliban guerrilla commander who was assassinated in 2001, two days before the 9/11 attacks. (Thomas Dworzak/Magnum Photos) Among them was Mohammed Qasim Fahim Khan, a Tajik militia commander. As leader of the Northern Alliance, Fahim Khan played a critical role in helping the United States topple the Taliban in 2001. He served as Afghanistan’s defense minister from 2001 to 2004 and later as the country’s first vice president — despite a reputation for brutality and graft. In a Lessons Learned interview, Ryan Crocker, who twice served as the top U.S. diplomat in Kabul, said he held no illusions about Fahim Khan. He recalled a bloodcurdling encounter with the defense minister in early 2002 when Fahim Khan nonchalantly informed him that another Afghan government minister had been murdered. “He giggled while he related this,” Crocker said. “Later, much later, it emerged, I don’t know if it was ever verified or not, it emerged that Khan himself had the minister killed. But I certainly came out of those opening THE AFGHANISTAN PAPERS Part 4: Consumed by corruptionmonths with the feeling that even by Afghan standards, I was in the More stories presence of a totally evil person.” Fahim Khan died of natural causes in 2014. But the ambassador said he was still haunted by memories of the warlord. Exclusive: A secret history of the war in Afghanistan, revealed 17:36 (Video by Joyce Lee/The Washington Post) “I check just about every other day, and as far as I know, he is still dead,” Crocker told interviewers. Even so, the Bush administration treated Fahim Khan as a VIP and once welcomed him to the Pentagon with an honor cordon. Details of exactly how much money he and other warlords pocketed from the United States remain secret. But confidential documents show the payouts were discussed at the highest levels of government. In April 2002, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld dictated a top-secret memo ordering two senior aides to work with other U.S. agencies to devise “a plan for how we are going to deal with each of these warlords — who is going to get money from whom, on what basis, in exchange for what, what is the quid pro quo, etc.” “Let’s get on it,” he admonished. Two months later, Rumsfeld sent a follow-up memo to Doug Feith, the Pentagon’s policy chief. “Is the DoD giving any food, weapons or money to any of the warlords or to Karzai? Is the CIA doing that? Is State doing it?” he wrote. “We need to get a sense of that balance.” UZBEK. The Rumsfeld memos were released by the TURKMEN. TAJIK. Pentagon in response to a FOIA lawsuit filed in 2017 by the National Security Archive, a Kabul THE AFGHANISTAN PAPERS Part 4: Consumed by corruption nonprofit research institute at George A F G H A N I S T A N More stories Washington University. They are among Kandahar HELMAND hundreds of pages of memos, known as PROV. P A K I S T A N “snowflakes,” that Rumsfeld dictated about the Afghan war between 2001 and 2005. IRAN INDIA Another warlord who was a prime beneficiary 100 MILES of U.S.