News that President Karzai has admitted to his palace receiving regular payments from the CIA led to the usual reactions on social media. There was lethal anger as a deeply disappointed patriot declared:
"Karzai should be hanged for this act of treason!"
There was lighthearted comedy as another poster, referring to the phrase "the CIA dropped the money", drew the following conclusion: "anything that comes from the top must be a gift of god."
In between these extreme reactions of anger and jest, there was the usual Afghan apathy smugly summed up: "As if we didn't know!"
Many Afghans did probably suspect that such transactions were taking place between the CIA and the palace. After all, accusing all sorts of people of being in the pay of the CIA is a favorite national pastime and a key ingredient of the Afghans' favorite conspiracy theory – that in Afghanistan, after God, it's the CIA that is in charge. The fact that the president not only admitted to these payments, but also openly thanked the CIA for the money adds a surreal element to the whole bizarre story. Then again, this is Afghanistan.
Be that as it may, the real story in this news has a different theme. The truth is that there's nothing newsworthy or even worrisome in the revelation that the CIA has been paying the palace. In reality, the practice of paying Afghans for their "loyalty" dates back to the mid 19th century. It was the British in India who, after the first Anglo-Afghan war, learned the lesson that to have a degree of control over the region now known as Afghanistan, it was altogether cheaper and more efficient to pay subsidies to Afghan leaders in return for their allegiance.
Like all good deals, this one, too, worked well for both sides. The British side saved lives and money; the Afghan state had cash to consolidate its power while at the same time pretending to be "sovereign and independent". This politically convenient arrangement not only set a precedent but also unwittingly legitimized what was, in effect, extortion: revolt and rebellions ensued every time subsidies were cut.
The result is the somewhat bedevilled scenario of today. Afghans have to be paid to fight; to not fight; to stop fighting if they are already fighting and to not start fighting if they are passive but restless. The whole country is a giant web of extortion and counter-extortion.
The ultimate goal was not to encourage this kind of corruption. Then, as now, the Afghan state used the cash-for-loyalty principle as a nonviolent means of pacifying a people not accustomed to living in a modern state and often violently refusing to do so. In a 1928 memorandum of the secretary of state for India, for example, we read that Kabul was paying large sums to Mullah Chaknaur, an influential cleric of the Mohmand tribe, in return for his keeping the tribe pacified. In the same memorandum, we also read that to curb the Shinwari tribal uprising that was happening at the same time, the Afghan state had twice used Soviet-manned aircraft to bomb the tribe.
The enemy within – in the shape of rebellious tribes, unruly imams and disloyal courtiers – has always been a potent rival of the Afghan state, a threat equal to, if not more dangerous than, any foreign power. To keep this enemy in check, the Afghan government needed cash and weapons. That is why, in the 1920s, Kabul regularly begged Moscow, London and Berlin to help it with war weaponry. London was reluctant, fearing that Kabul might use British aircraft to bomb the unruly border tribes and in doing so, risk launching a major anti-British uprising on the Indian side of the Afghan frontier.
In 1979, the beleaguered Afghan leader Nur Muhammad Taraki begged Moscow to use Soviet pilots and aircraft to curb an uprising in the city of Herat. In 1996, the Taliban came to power, counting on the Pakistani ISI's support. The woeful laments of former Taliban official turned Guantánamo prisoner turned writer of a boring autobiography, Mullah Zaeif, reveals this much. The ex-Taliban sounds like a jilted lover when he talks about how easy it was for the ISI to feed him to the Americans.
The patron-client list is long, but what is the lesson? If Afghans love their sovereignty as much as they proclaim they do, then they should stop rebelling against their state and start paying taxes instead.