Syria’s cache of chemical weapons is believed to be the largest in the Middle East. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s stockpile of the nerve agent sarin stockpile “is estimated in the high hundreds of tons, possibly over 1,000 tons,” says Laicie Heeley, director of Middle East and defense policy at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Arms Control & Non-Proliferation.
In Afghanistan, Money Can’t Buy Us Love (Or Much of Anything Else)
On April 28, the New York Times’ Matthew Rosenberg reported that for years, the CIA has been sending money to the office of Afghan President Hamid Karzai – sometimes in the form of actual shopping bags full of cash. According to Rosenberg’s story, the money is meant “to maintain access to Mr. Karzai and his inner circle and to guarantee the [CIA]’s influence at the presidential palace.” (The Guardian reported separately that Britain’s MI6 has been sending smaller payments to Karzai as well).
The revelation of a regular flow of “ghost money” between a US agency and Karzai is all the more surprising given Karzai’s apparent penchant for defying and insulting his American “partners.” Indeed, Karzai’s unwillingness to cooperate with the United States despite the payments corroborates Spencer Ackerman’s conclusion: influence is easy to purchase, but leverage is not.
Speaking to CNN’s Jake Tapper about the story, Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation fellow Ambassador Peter Galbraith noted that this episode is symptomatic of the larger problems that the United States faces in Afghanistan. The money and lives we expend in Afghanistan, whether by delivering cash to the President, fighting counterinsurgency battles that are often futile, or pouring money into failed infrastructure projects, doesn’t seem to be buying us anything. In fact, it’s likely that our payments are actually making the situation in Afghanistan worse: in a fragile economy with a poor capacity for cash absorption, injections of money like this tend to end up in the wrong hands, fueling corruption and instability.
When asked by Tapper if the U.S. was getting what it was paying for with Karzai, Amb. Galbraith pointed out that the price of our war in Afghanistan is far more than what’s contained in those shopping bags: “What we’ve been paying for in Afghanistan is not the millions of dollars that have been channeled to Mr. Karzai personally” – rather, the real cost has been the “5 or 6 hundred billion [dollars] and the lives of Americans and also the effort of our allies.”
Moneybags from the CIA are, as Galbraith notes, the least of our worries in Afghanistan, but they should still serve as a powerful reminder of how much has gone wrong in the war, and how little influence we retain in a region that we have tried in vain to control.
Could a nuclear-armed Iran be contained?
Published in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists Online By Kingston Reif Article summary below; read the full text here. On September 4, 1962, President John F. Kennedy released a statement in response to intelligence reports of a Soviet arms buildup in Cuba. Kennedy said the United States did not have evidence “of the presence of […]
Foreign Policy Story on Syria’s Sarin Stockpile Quotes Laicie Heeley & James Lewis
Mideast weapons proliferation expert Laicie Heeley tells Foreign Policy that most estimates for the actual sarin stockpile hover around “the high hundreds of tons, possibly over 1,000.”
Quote of the Day: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Missile Defense Edition
SEN. CRUZ: You know, I would note that the president’s budget, while not accounting for sequestration, nonetheless cuts $500 million for missile defense. And in my judgment, particularly given the threats we are seeing from North Korea, the potential t…