Buried in the recent New York Times revelation that the CIA has been delivering bags of cash to Afghan President Hamid Karzai is a nugget of information that tells the whole story about just how self-defeating U.S. Afghanistan policy has been. It solves some riddles that mystified a lot of us at the time -- and constitutes an object lesson for the future.
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The CIA's bag man was Muhammad Zia Salehi.
In July 2010, this same Salehi was arrested by U.S.-mentored Afghan police officers, on charges of influence peddling. At the time, U.S. civilian and military officials had begun to grasp how damaging Afghan government corruption was to what they were trying to achieve in Afghanistan, and were beginning to take serious steps to counter it. Salehi's arrest was the climax of that process.
It was a dramatic success, an offshoot of months of painstaking investigation into a nearly billion-dollar sinkhole in Afghanistan's top private financial institution, Kabul Bank. The decision to develop the case had been run up the U.S. interagency flagpole. Senior U.S. officials, at last sensitized to the corruption problem and anxious for a test case, had approved it and were kept informed along the way. Afghan officials, too. Karzai himself had authorized the arrest.
But before nightfall, Salehi made a phone call and Karzai reversed course, ordering his release. Charges were quickly dropped. This episode ended any serious U.S. anti-corruption efforts in Afghanistan. Which in turn ensured that all other efforts, all the sacrifice, would be in vain.
Karzai was not shy about his interference with the judicial process on Salehi's behalf. "I intervened very, very strongly," he boasted to ABC's "This Week" program a month later, citing the conditions of the arrest. "This man was taken out of his house in the middle of the night by 30 Kalashnikov-toting masked men in the name of Afghan law enforcement. This is exactly reminiscent of the days of the Soviet Union, where people were taken away from their homes by armed people in the name of the state and thrown into obscure prisons and in some kind of kangaroo courts."
Nothing of the sort happened. At the time, I sat down separately with two law enforcement officers close to the investigation and reconstructed the sequence of events. Karzai had agreed to order the arrest on the basis of a judicially-authorized wiretap that U.S. officials had played for one of his key advisors, my sources explained. Salehi's voice could be heard demanding a payoff. The Afghan attorney general signed the arrest warrant, and the interior minister detailed a special police unit to execute it.
When the Afghan police officers arrived at Salehi's house, according to the team's chief U.S. mentor, they did not storm it or break down his door; they called him on his cell phone, identified themselves, and asked him to come out. Irate, Salehi phoned a different Afghan security service, whose men rushed to the scene, exchanged shots with the arresting officers, but eventually retreated. Next, Salehi dialed up the interior minister, who explained to him that Karzai in person had approved the arrest, and Salehi had better surrender.
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