DEXTER FILKINS - ESSAY


KABUL, Afghanistan - Fazel Ahmad Faqiryar, Afghanistan’s deputy attorney general, last month took the politically risky course of trying to prosecute senior members of President Hamid Karzai’s government. A short time later, Mr. Faqiryar was fired ? on the order, it appears, of Mr. Karzai himself. “The law in this country is only for the poor,”

Mr. Faqiryar said . The ouster of Mr. Faqiryar raised a fundamental question for the American and European leaders who bankroll Mr. Karzai’s government: What if government corruption is more dangerous than the Taliban? Since 2001, one of the premises of American and NATO policy has been that ordinary Afghans don’t view public corruption in quite the same way that others do in the West.

Senior officials often say privately that while public graft is pernicious, there is no point in trying to abolish it ? and that trying to do so could destroy the very government the West has helped to build. The Central Intelligence Agency has even put on its payroll some of the most disputable members of Mr. Karzai’s government.

“What is acceptable to the Afghans is different than what is acceptable to you or me or our people,” a Western official here said recently. But it now seems clear that, rather than being tolerated, public corruption is roundly despised by ordinary Afghans, and that it may constitute the single largest factor driving them into the arms of the Taliban.

You don’t have to look very hard to find an Afghan who is repelled by the illegal doings of his leaders. Ahmed Shah Hakimi runs a currency exchange in Kabul. “Why do the Americans support them?’’ he asked, genuinely perplexed. “What the Americans need to do is take these Afghans and put them on a plane and fly them to America ? and then crash the plane into a mountain,” Mr. Hakimi said. “Kill them all.”

It turns out, of course, that some of the same “malign actors” the diplomats and officers are railing against are on the payroll of the C.I.A. At least until recently, American officials say, one of them was Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president’s brother. Mr. Karzai has long been suspected of facilitating the country’s booming drug trade. Ahmed Wali Karzai denies taking any money from the C.I.A. or helping any drug traffickers. But consider, for a second, the other brother: President Karzai. When he receives those stern lectures from the Americans about ridding his government of corruption what must President Karzai be thinking? One possibility: That the Americans aren’t really serious. The real difficulty, American commanders say, is that taking down the biggest Afghan politicians could open a vacuum of authority.

And that could create instability that the Taliban could take advantage of. American officers have every right to worry about stability. But the trouble with this argument is that, increasingly, there is less and less stability to keep. And many believe it’s the corruption itself that is the instability’s root cause.

As for Mr. Faqiryar, he has become a national icon. A recent editorial in a local newspaper urged Mr. Faqiryar to carry on his fight against the gangster-state that his country has become. “We are a nation,” the editors said, “in desperate need of more heroes.”


The average Afghan citizen is growing less tolerant of the rampant corruption in the administration of President Hamid Karzai, right.