Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Dear Mr. President,

I bet the Dexter Filkins article, “The Afghan Bank Heist” in this week’s New Yorker gave you some heartburn. It should have. Kabul Bank: nine hundred million, probably more, “lost,” gone, vanished, unaccounted for, all of it lining the pockets of Karzai and his cronies. Almost a billion dollars disappears without a trace in a country whose entire GDP is only twelve billion. Eight and a third percent of the GDP gone to graft, bribes, kickbacks and outright thievery, most of it, maybe all of it, U.S. taxpayer dollars. And that’s just one bank. In 2009 the flow of U.S. dollars out of Afghanistan was estimated at $2.5 billion. According to Transparency International, Afghanistan is the third most corrupt country in the world, behind only Somalia and Myanmar. “It’s a vertically integrated criminal enterprise,” one anonymous American official is quoted as saying. The corruption and scandal of the Karzai government, the article shows, is simply staggering, so much so that no one in your administration is allowed to talk about it. Not the investigators who have irrefutable proof, not the generals, not the diplomats, no one. They’ve all been ordered to keep their mouths shut. Here at home meanwhile, the budget deficits continue to mount, civil servant salaries are frozen for two years, domestic spending faces deep budget cuts and state governments are out of money. So how’s the war in Afghanistan going, Mr. President? Investigators discovered that a good percentage of the money we give the Afghan government, maybe 10%, winds up in the hands of the Taliban who uses it to field their insurgent fighters. “The Americans, it turns out, are funding both sides of the war.” Tell me again where you’re seeing signs of progress? As one Afghan businessman said, “Right now, this country is all about raping and pillaging as much as you can, because there is no faith in the future.” He added that the Taliban believe in their cause but the Karzai people believe in nothing but self-enrichment. This war is a moral evil. We are backing yet another corrupt and repressive regime. It’s clear we’ve given up on Karzai and yet we’re still there, still shelling out $13 billion a month, and our troops are still killing and being killed. For what purpose, Mr. President? By the time I finished the article it was no longer clear who the enemy was or what we’re doing there. What is our goal in Afghanistan? Can you please explain any of this?