"As President Obama prepares to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, U.S. officials on the ground are despairing over what some describe as the flagrant corruption of President Hamid Karzai's government. Among the most alarming developments: mounting evidence that Afghan government officials are spiriting millions of dollars in illicitly gained assets out of the country to the Persian Gulf. A special U.S. money laundering task force, dubbed the Afghan Threat Finance Cell, is monitoring the movements. "It's very blatant-they are literally smuggling suitcases of bulk cash and moving them to Dubai," said one U.S. official familiar with the money movements as well as other recent investigations into Afghan corruption.
In one recent high profile case, two officials of the Hajj and Islamic Affairs Ministry (just reeking of piety!) were arrested by Afghan at Kabul International Airport trying to carry $360,000--some of it hidden in biscuit boxes--out the country. The fund had allegedly been extorted from landlords around Mecca in return for directing Afghan pilgrims to their apartments-a scheme that U.S. and Afghan officials suspect was overseen by the Islamic Affairs Minister. ("I am 100 percent innocent," the minister, Sadiq Chakari, declared in a recent press conference.)
But that seizure is almost certainly the tip of a vast money laundering iceberg, U.S. law enforcement officials say. Law enforcement officials in the United Arab Emirates have intercepted couriers from Afghanistan arriving at Dubai's airport with "millions of dollars in suitcases," according to a little-noticed passage in a recent Senate Foreign Relations Committee report. What happens to the funds after that is anybody's guess. "We don't know, once the money comes into Dubai, where it goes," said one U.S. Embassy official in Dubai, quoted in the Senate report...."
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