How The Bush Administration Turned Afghanistan Into A Slush Fund

The problems with the Afghanistan withdrawal begin with the invasion in 2001. The Bush Administration turned the country into a giant slush fund that was continued through the next three presidents. The amount of corruption is truly remarkable.

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Emma: So I guess let's go back a little bit to the Bush administration and talk about their pretty much brazen ignorance about some of the ethnic gradations and the dynamics on the ground including the installation of Hamad Karzai. Which led to rampant corruption including a heroin trade.

Jim RIsen: Right yeah I mean one of the interesting things I mean the Taliban have rightly been accused of benefiting from the drug trade. But so did the US-backed government. And in fact, Hamid Karzai was the first president of Afghanistan. Who the united states installed early on largely because they thought he you know since he was Pashtun that that would be a nice sock to the Pashtun community. Although he was from a pretty minor tribe and he wasn't considered a major Pashtun leader. But when he came in one of the things he did was install his younger half-brother Ahmed wali Karzai to be essentially the viceroy of southern Afghanistan was his official title I believe was deputy governor of Kandahar province but that didn't explain who he really was and what his power was. He had enormous power for years over southern Afghanistan and that meant he controlled the roads in and out of Afghanistan with Pakistan. And so he could control in large measure the Afghan heroin trade which is enormous you know. I think Afghanistan today produces more than 80% of the world's heroin supply. and most of it is in southern Afghanistan. Where a lot of it is. And so Ahmed Wali Karzai became the boss of the heroin trade and the united states knew this. the drug enforcement administration had evidence of Ahmed Wali Karzai’s control over the business. But the Bush administration didn't want to do anything about it because they didn't want to upset the Karzai's. They didn't want to get sidetracked in what they would consider being sidetracked from their essential counterterrorism role. But it was a total lack of understanding of the corruption that was growing in the new US-backed government. And that was yet another reason why so many afghans turned against the local Karzai government and later the Ashraf Ghani government. Because the corruption was so endemic and so built into the whole system. that nobody trusted it and it explains I think in large measure why the Afghan army just collapsed overnight. Because nobody felt any connection to the us-backed central government.

Emma: Right and a lot of that corruption were aided by the flood of US money coming in that went into that heroin trade went into the corruption and of course went to defense contractors which we can touch on as well. Not necessarily to regular afghans. Talk a little bit about that if you could.

Risen: Yeah I mean I think the statistic that I think explains everything wrong about our involvement in Afghanistan is that we spent 145 billion dollars on reconstruction in Afghanistan over 20 years. and the afghan gross domestic product as recently as 2019 was only 19 billion. if you realize if you do the math that means our reconstruction was flooding and overwhelming and essentially the afghan economy and turning it into the surreal bubble that made no sense whatsoever. and add to that the drug cash and the massive amounts of funding for combat operations and you have this river of cash American cash flowing through there. and you know the temptation for corruption was overwhelming.