The American government calls it "the war on terror". After reading this I think they got the name wrong. Should have been "the terrifying excuse for a war".

The CIA Gave Karzai Bags Full of Cash for Over a Decade

Afghan president Hamid Karzai has a sugar daddy, and its name is the Central Intelligence Agency. Or at least it had a sugar daddy. For over ten years, American spies greased Karzai's palms about once a month with suitcases, backpacks and even plastic grocery bags full of cash. And not those relatively worthless Afghanis either. According to a New York Times investigation, the CIA delivered tens of millions of dollars in cash right to Karzai's office. "We called it 'ghost money,' " Khalil Roman, Karzai's former chief of staff, told The Times. "It came in secret, and it left in secret."

This is nuts. It's absolutely bonkers. This is the sort of thing you'd expect to see in some Clive Owen movie about Americ's distopic future when we're ruled by mobsters with eye patches or something. Or at the very least, it's something that read about happening in a corrupt Central African dictatorship. In fact, a similar thing happened just a few days ago in Uganda where the president thought it would be a good idea to distribute a photo of him handing a giant bag of cash to some voters to show how generous he was. Bad idea, because handing out big bags of trash typically a sign of rampant corruption. (Well behaved people just write checks.)

Evidently, that's exactly what's happening in Afghanistan. "The biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan was the United States," an America official said to The Times. To give you a sense of the scale of corruption, the only other country found to be delivering bags of cash to Karzai was none other than Iran. And what do we get for all that bread? Officials on both sides say that "the agency.s main goal in providing the cash has been to maintain access to Mr. Karzai and his inner circle and to guarantee the agency's influence at the presidential palace, which wields tremendous power in Afghanistan's highly centralized government."

https://www.google.com/search?q=karzai%27s+office+gets+bag+full+of+cash&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

I guess my only question is "Why are you surprised?" The "war on terror" was always an excuse to funnel money into places that it was hard to give our tax money to without the excuse of a war.

bluemoon wrote:I guess my only question is "Why are you surprised?" The "war on terror" was always an excuse to funnel money into places that it was hard to give our tax money to without the excuse of a war.

Well for ya long time I've been talking to an ex-Marine friend who has been doing civilian contract work on the bases in Iraq and Afghanistan for several years and he's told me about all the monumental waste. Equipment that was sent over there that was never needed, wanted or used just sitting and rotting in the desert.

But not even that prepared me for this. Suitcases and bags with millions in American taxpayer treasury just being handed over to some raghead opium lord politician who has said "if the U.S. doesn't do right I think I'll just align myself with the Taliban".

And I guess when John Chickenhawk Bolton says we need to stay over there "until the job is done whenever that is" this must be the job he's talking about. To just give more and more millions in cash to more and more ragheads.
As I said, they got the name for this "war" wrong. It deserved the word "terror" in it but not in the way they mean. The mealy-mouthed cocksuckers like Chickenhawk John who want to keep all this going are what's terrifying.

Sal wrote:Meanwhile back at the ranch, our roads and bridges are in disrepair, our aging power grid is archaic and stretched to capacity, we can no longer provide early education and meals to our impoverished children, and Congress has to pass special legislation so their flights will be on time.

This is what the end of an empire looks like.

okay that deserves me removing you from my foes list...welcome back

Any time the government is doling out money, there will be corruption.