The Wrongologist

What’s
Wrong Today:

Today’s
New York Times reports about the CIA’s moves to curry favor with Hamid
Karzai and high ranking members of Afghanistan’s government through direct cash
payments dropped off at Karzai’s office:

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

Perhaps
the most disturbing aspect of these cash payments is that they seem to have
been designed in large part to pay off Afghan warlords:

One warlord
who is still on the payroll is Abdul Rashid Dostum, an ethnic Uzbek whose
militia served as a CIA proxy force in 2001. He receives nearly $100,000 a
month from the palace, two Afghan officials said.

Mr. Dostum
was quoted in a 2009 interview with Time magazine:

Although
this influence-buying program has cost us tens of millions of dollars over the last
10 years, it is chump change compared to the real theft of US funds in
Afghanistan. The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR)
noted in the January, 2013
report that huge sums of cash exit Afghanistan through the Kabul airport:
(emphasis by the Wrongologist)

Where does
the all the cash come from? The largest flow of money into Afghanistan comes
from the US and the biggest program that we fund supports Afghan security
forces. Congress created the Afghanistan
Security Forces Fund (ASFF) to provide the Afghan National Security Force
(ANSF) with equipment, supplies, services, and training, as well as facility
and infrastructure repair, renovation, and construction.

This chart
from the SIGAR report shows how lavishly the ASFF has been funded by the US Congress:

It shows that
the US has been providing well over $8 billion a year to fund Afghan security
forces every year since 2010. This adds up to more than $44 billion since 2005.
So, that $4.5 billion that left by plane in 2011 is 10% of what we have “officially” put into the country in the past 8 years!

So these are your tax dollars at work.

It is laughable
when Congress tells the American public that it’s now time for belt-tightening,
while they continue to throw billions of dollars at another endless, undeclared
war.

Meanwhile,
we must accept chained CPI because social security will only be able to pay 75%
of benefits in 2033. Medicare must be cut so that the deficit shrinks faster than
it is already shrinking.

Our
lawmakers’ priorities remain misguided. We have an abundance of unemployed
Americans, a declining middle class, failing schools, decaying infrastructure, apparently,
none of which we are able to fund.

But, we
have millions of dollars to give to a corrupt politician and dictator in
Afghanistan. We allow billions of dollars to be skimmed off the top and moved
out of Afghanistan and into tax-haven bank accounts.

What a
sham.

We will
leave Afghanistan in 2014 after thirteen years of occupation. Our latest military
guru on the ground, General Joseph Dunford, Jr., who the Times
noted this week, offered up this happy talk:  

Bull. In
2014, Afghanistan will have elections, a new president, a military transition and the same old Taliban. In November
2012, the Wrongologist said:

Karzai
& friends will be gone will $Billions of our money. The Afghans who remain will have no
money to maintain what we’ve tried to build. Their plan is Karzai’s: To remain
on our payroll.

Absent
that, they will have little choice but to skim money from the opium trade, and
we’ll have little choice but to look the other way.

Forget the
money. Has this been worth the lives of 2033 Americans?