KABUL - The CIA’s station chief in Kabul met with President Hamid Karzai on Saturday, and the Afghan leader said he had been assured the agency would continue dropping off stacks of cash at his office despite a storm of criticism that has broken out since the payments were disclosed.
The CIA money, Karzai told reporters, was “an easy source of petty cash,” and some of it was used to pay off members of the political elite, a group dominated by warlords.
The use of the CIA cash for payoffs has prompted criticism from many Afghans and some U.S. and European officials who complain that the agency, in its quest to maintain access and influence at the presidential palace, financed what is essentially a presidential slush fund. The practice, the officials say, effectively undercut a pillar of the American war strategy: the building of a clean and credible Afghan government to wean popular support from the Taliban.
Instead, corruption at the highest levels seems to have only worsened. The International Monetary Fund recently warned diplomats in Kabul that the Afghan government faced a potentially severe budget shortfall partly because of the increasing theft of customs duties and officially abetted tax evasion.
On Saturday, Karzai sought to dampen the furor over the payments, describing them as one facet of the billions of dollars in aid Afghanistan receives each year. “This is nothing unusual,” he said.
He said the cash helped pay rent for various officials, treat wounded members of his presidential guard and even pay for scholarships. Karzai said that when he met with the CIA station chief, “I told him because of all these rumors in the media, please do not cut all this money because we really need it.”
“It has helped us a lot, it has solved lots of our problems,” he said. “We appreciate it.”
The comments were his first in Kabul since The New York Times reported the payments last week, when he was traveling in Europe, where he briefly addressed the issue.
Yet Karzai, in offering his most detailed accounting to date of how the money had been used, probably raised as many questions as he answered.
Formal aid, for instance, is publicly accounted for and audited. The CIA’s cash is not, though Karzai did say the Americans were given receipts for the money they dropped off at the presidential palace.
Asked why money used for what would appear to be justifiable governing and charitable expenses was handed over secretly by the CIA and not routed through the State Department, Karzai replied: “This is cash. It is the choice of the U.S. government.”
He added: “If tomorrow the State Department decides to give us such cash, I’d welcome that, too.”
Karzai declined to specify how much cash his office receives each month, or to provide a total of how much it has been given by the CIA so far. He had met the agency’s station chief in Kabul a few hours earlier, he said, and it was made clear to him that “we are not allowed to disclose” the amount.
Current and former Afghan officials who spoke before last week said the payments had totaled tens of millions of dollars since they began a decade ago.
The U.S. Embassy in Kabul, which handles queries for the CIA, declined to comment.
But it was Karzai’s acknowledgment that some of the money had been given to “political elites” that was most likely to intensify concerns about the cash and how it is used.
In Afghanistan, the political elite includes many men more commonly described as warlords, numerous people with ties to the opium trade and to organized crime along with lawmakers and other senior officials. Many were the subjects of American-led investigations that yielded reams of intelligence and evidence but almost no significant prosecutions by the Afghan authorities.
Karzai did not address those concerns Saturday. He instead emphasized that no one group or political faction was given special treatment.
”Yes, sometimes Afghanistan’s political elites have some needs, they have requested our help and we have helped them,” Karzai said. “But we have not spent it to strengthen a particular political movement. It’s not like that. It has been given to individuals.”
Karzai is not the first Afghan to receive money from the CIA, which paid warlords to fight the Taliban during the invasion in 2001 and has paid others to keep fighting in the years since.
It also financed the mujahedeen fighters who battled the Soviet Union’s occupation in the 1980s. Many mujahedeen leaders are now senior officials in Karzai’s government and prominent politicians.
The payments to the presidential palace appear to be on a far vaster scale, however. They also appear to have had a far wider impact, fueling the same patronage networks that American diplomats, law-enforcement agents and soldiers struggled unsuccessfully to dismantle.
Karzai is not believed to have personally profited. But the CIA money has proved essential to his ability to govern, according to current and former Afghan officials who had first described the payments. His administration is not centered on a political party or a particular ideology and instead draws strength largely from its ability to buy off warlords, lawmakers and other prominent - and potentially troublesome - Afghans.
The United States was not alone in keeping the Karzai administration awash in cash. Iran, too, made regular cash payments to the presidential palace, though Karzai said Saturday that the country cut off the money after Afghanistan began negotiating a strategic partnership deal with the United States.
The British intelligence agency MI6 has given small amounts for special projects, he said. But its payments were not regular and were a fraction of what the Americans and Iranians gave.
Asked if any other countries were dropping off stacks of cash at the palace, Karzai said: “No, none. And even if they were, we wouldn’t let you know. We wouldn’t tell you that.”
News of the payments dominated the news media in Afghanistan over the past week, with lawmakers calling for an investigation and some suggesting that taking the cash was potentially treasonous. And there have been jokes, of course. At the palace Saturday, Afghan reporters laughed at the “CIA burgers” they were served for lunch after the news conference.
Members of Congress have also raised questions about the payments. Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., wrote to President Barack Obama last week expressing concern that CIA payments appeared to “indicate an incoherent U.S. policy toward Afghanistan,” and asking for an explanation.
“The alleged arrangements make accountability impossible and promote corruption at the top levels of the Afghan government, as well as break trust with the American taxpayer,” Corker wrote.
Meanwhile, seven U.S. soldiers and a member of the NATO-led coalition were killed Saturday in one of the deadliest days for Americans and other foreign troops in Afghanistan in recent months, as the Taliban continued attacks as part of their spring offensive.
The U.S.-led coalition reported that five international troops were killed by a roadside bomb in southern Afghanistan, and coalition spokesman Capt. Luca Carniel confirmed that all five were American.
The coalition did not disclose the location of the roadside bombing. However, Javeed Faisal, a spokesman for the governor of Kandahar province, said the coalition patrol hit the bomb in the Maiwand district of the province, the spiritual birthplace of the Taliban.
Later, the coalition reported that a soldier with the Afghan National Army turned his weapon on coalition troops in the west, killing two in the most recent of so-called insider attacks. Such attacks by members of the Afghan security forces against their colleagues or international troops have eroded confidence in the Afghan forces as they work to take over from foreign forces.
The two killed were American, according to two U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to disclose the nationalities ahead of an official announcement.
Another coalition service member was killed in an insurgent attack in northern Afghanistan, the NATO-led force said. It did not provide any further details.
It was the fourth time since last summer that seven Americans have been killed on a single day in the war.
During the news conference at the presidential palace, Karzai also discussed ongoing negotiations on a U.S.-Afghan bilateral security agreement.He said talks had been delayed because of certain conditions that Afghanistan was insisting be included in the pact, which will govern a U.S. military presence after 2014 when nearly all foreign combat troops are to have finished their withdrawal from Afghanistan. The talks, which started in late 2012, are set to last up to a year.
Obama has not said how many troops will remain, although there have been estimates ranging from 8,000 to 12,000. It is unlikely such an announcement will be made until the security agreement is signed. Those troops would help train Afghan forces and also carry out operations against al-Qaida and other militant groups.
Karzai said Afghanistan was ready to sign a deal as long as the American government in exchange for being able to stay on bases in the country agrees to terms of Afghan security, funding assistance and help with training and equipping Afghan security forces. It is thought that the contentious issue of providing U.S. troops immunity from Afghan law is a low priority for the Afghan government in the negotiations.
The Afghan government has not said how much rent it would want for three or four U.S. bases, but it is believed to be in the billions. Afghanistan is also thought to be seeking security guarantees to protect its porous borders, including the frontier with Pakistan that is the main infiltration route for insurgents who retain sanctuary in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas.
It was unclear how Karzai expected the United States or any of its allies to guarantee Afghanistan’s borders against attack.
Information for this article was contributed by Matthew Rosenberg, Rod Nordland and Sangar Rahimi of The New York Times; and by Patrick Quinn and Rahim Faiez of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 05/05/2013