Gasp! The CIA is paying bad people in Afghanistan!
The New York Times implies there’s a problem with fighting corruption in the Afghan government while paying the corrupt, in this case Mohammed Zia Salehi, the chief administration on Afghanistan’s National Security Council:
Mr. Salehi’s relationship with the C.I.A. underscores deep contradictions at the heart of the Obama administration’s policy in Afghanistan, with American officials simultaneously demanding that Hamid Karzai root out the corruption that pervades his government while sometimes subsidizing the very people suspected of perpetrating it.
That’s not right. If we begin holding every official in Afghanistan to some vague corruption-based litmus test, the intelligence community would be completely handcuffed: I’d bet you a paycheck that you could pin some sort of corruption charge on every single official in the entire country.
After all, it’s a bit of a Catch-22, right? If Afghanistan was a graft-free Jeffersonian democracy, CIA wouldn’t have such a need need to recruit unsavory sources like Salehi. But the country is a mess, and our intelligence community better damn-well have its ear to the ground. And if we really want to stop corruption at the highest level, Salehi has regular access to the biggest fish of them all: Karzai. That’s highly valuable.
I understand the desire to keep things above-board, but tough situations demand hard choices, and paying a well-placed but corrupt source is clearly the lesser evil.
Photo credit: World Economic Forum’s photostream
