Renting Afghan warlords
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Renting Afghan warlords describes the CIA's opening approach in Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks: paying the country's regional commanders in bulk cash for cooperation, on the understanding that the arrangement was a lease rather than a purchase.

The saying

The agency maxim is that you cannot buy an Afghan warlord but you can certainly rent one, an observation Kiriakou describes as the CIA way, which is to throw massive amounts of money at a problem and hope some of it sticks. In the earliest days of the war money was moved in quantities that made ordinary accounting irrelevant; officers were, in his phrase, literally throwing money out of the side of helicopters. The premise underneath it is the standing operational assumption that intelligence is a cash business and cash is not a problem.

What it bought

Some of the money stuck, and the arrangement bought the United States time. It did not buy what it was meant to. Instead of warlords capturing senior al-Qaeda figures and handing them over, Guantanamo Bay and other sites filled with what Kiriakou calls largely innocent nobodies, men turned in by neighbours for a bounty, or by people settling scores.

See also

- Guantanamo Bay
- General Abdul Rashid Dostum
- Afghan heroin policy
- CIA cash room
- Agent Payment Mechanics
