KABUL, Afghanistan – President Hamid Karzai has again challenged the patience of his international backers as he desperately tries to keep an FBI-sponsored corruption investigation from breaching the walls of the presidential palace.
At the center of the controversy is a body set up in February by the FBI and supported by the Afghan Interior Ministry, called the Major Crimes Task Force, or MCTF. Staffed with elite Afghan law enforcement personnel trained and mentored by the FBI, it was going to break new ground in targeting officials who stepped over the line.
The problem, say insiders, was that the MCTF did its job all too well. Lulled by the president’s assurances of total independence, it successfully went after some of the top members of government, including a close aide to the president himself.
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Any surprise here? Same old Same old. Politics and corruption, who would have thought it?
mid island mike
You reap what you sow. A few days ago US vice president Joe Biden, in Iraq to mark the end of US combat operations, said he believed Iraqis were close to forming a government. The war is supposedly over there and Iraq still doesn’t have a democratic government, so it makes no sense that all such criticism is only being leveled at Afghanistan, which despite still being a war zone, does have a popular if not yet fully functional democratic government. So imagine that, given three decades of perpetual war in tribal Afghanistan, influential Afghans are not likely to be clean wholesome types, but rather the very same unsavory characters that the CIA and the US military sought out and recruited for the very purpose of unseating the Taliban government, leaving them in positions of power and with no political opposition as a result. Under the circumstances it truly would be miraculous if there was no corruption in Afghanistan, which is why there are still more than a few things about such articles that are bothersome.
About 99% of all the banks in the world have recently experienced trouble with unsecured loans and real estate speculation, not just Afghanistan’s banks, why is this still news to anyone? Unlike the rest of the world however, Afghanistan’s fledgling banking system has been set up entirely by western experts enlisted to the task by the UN, operating under the close supervision of the CIA and US military intelligence, to ensure that large amounts of money are not being channeled to the Taliban. Therefore to now blame all the problems with its new banking system on the also very new Afghanistan government which was likewise being set up in parallel, or on bank investors themselves who have been kept out of the process entirely, seems ridiculous. Also, no country, including Canada and even the USA would let the FBI have unfettered access to all its citizen’s banking information, so why is it surprising that the Karzai government would be bothered by it as well, when it clearly undermines Afghanistan’s sovereignty, and will serve to stiffle investment and therefore economic growth in such a dirt poor country?
Most likely the Americans are only going to end up uncovering more of their own complete incompetence. For years the MSM printed innuendo, probably coming from the FBI, about Karzai’s brother accepting money, which as it turns out was actually supplied by the CIA for the purposes of collecting information, and in turn US military intelligence, through its own ineptitude, has allowed that classified information to be made public, endangering the Afghan civilians who supplied it. There can be no doubt that some some corruption exists in Afghanistan just as it does everywhere else, so why is it only news that the CIA has promoted unsavory characters into positions of power in Afghanistan, but not in Iraq and everywhere else they have done so with even less success to show for it, if not to undermine either Afghanistan’s current government, or the continuing war effort, or both?
As things stand, either we are to believe that President Karzai is some kind of financial wizard, able to bypass all the protections of a banking system designed from the ground up by western experts, right under the noses of hundreds of FBI, CIA and US military intelligence operatives, who not only have unprecedented and unfettered access to banking information in Afghanistan, but have also been endangering Afghan citizens by paying them for unofficial information as well, or such articles as this are mostly unsubstantiated bullshit. Therefore, if the US government has garnered evidence that implicates President Karzai in any crimes, and under the circumstances it is very difficult to see how the US could still be without such evidence if it does in fact exist, it should be released to the public already.