At first, when I read this story describing how Hamid Karzai’s government is insisting that a bunch of security contractors pay back taxes before he’ll recertify them to work in Afghanistan, I though it was just out of a desire to get rid of contractors. The Afghan government issued its unexpected tax demand last month, [...]

All this talk about Hosni Mubarak’s looted billions must really piss off our other client rulers, the ones who have not yet set aside such rich stashes for their retirement. But someone in Iraq has already made the move, disappearing $40 billion from Iraq’s development fund. Around $40 billion are “missing” from a post-Gulf War [...]

Update: I’m wrong about this being buried–it will be in tomorrow’s NYT, so big coverage. When Jeff Stein reported that Mullah Omar was rushed to a hospital for heart treatment, I was pretty sure the real story was about Dewey Clarridge’s Eclipse group, which the NYT had suggested before might be involved in a privatized [...]

The Telegraph reports that a High Peace Council convened by Hamid Karzai may request that some Gitmo detainees be freed so they can participate in peace talks. (h/t Carol Rosenberg) Taliban prisoners would be freed from Guantánamo Bay to potentially join peace negotiations under a proposal from the Afghan council appointed to find a settlement [...]

The outage of the day is the report that Hamid Karzai’s chief of staff, Umar Daudzai, receives a steady stream of bags of Euros from Iran. One evening last August, as President Hamid Karzai wrapped up an official visit to Iran, his personal plane sat on the airport tarmac, waiting for a late-running passenger: Iran’s [...]

Sorry for the delay in blogging today–I got distracted with something.I should be back at this blogging thing shortly. In the meantime, I wanted to link to this post Spencer did at Danger Room: The Pentagon quietly announced yesterday that Rear Admiral Kathleen Dussault is out as commander of Task Force 2010, a unit co-established [...]

The most depressing part of this McClatchy article on the corrupt USAID contracting in Afghanistan by the construction company, Louis Berger, are six-year old quotes calling for an alternative to Berger. Behind the scenes, U.S. officials repeatedly have voiced frustration about the company’s work. In May 2004 — three months after then-President George W. Bush [...]

I’ve been tracking the debate within the Administration over whether we should tolerate corruption in Afghanistan in the name of sustaining a war against someone–anyone–in Afghanistan or not for some weeks. Underlying the entire debate is the fact that our goals in Afghanistan–which started as a pursuit of those who struck us on 9/11 and [...]

I wanted to add to what David Dayen had to say about these two stories. Last week, the WaPo quoted at least two military figures stating, as fact, that the Taliban was a bigger threat to the US mission in Afghanistan than corruption. Based on that judgment, the WaPo suggests “military officials” are now pursuing [...]

Keep in mind as you read these four paragraphs from WaPo’s follow-up on NYT’s story on Mohammed Zia Salehi that the person quoted is almost certainly from the same CIA that profiles terrorist organizations that, regardless of the charitable work they do, may not legally receive money. U.S. officials did not dispute that Salehi was [...]