Email to Friends
Comment (KABUL -- Among the soldiers, diplomats and aid workers who live in Afghanistan, it is the problem that nobody dares mention.
Among ordinary Afghans, it's a daily presence, the corruption that is rooted deeply in the Western-backed Afghan government and its appointed officials.
When Afghans are forced by uniformed men to pay large sums of cash in order to travel safely on provincial roads, as they are daily, when their colleagues are arrested and beaten in exchange for ransom payments, when they learn that people pay $150,000 for the job of district police chief in parts of Kandahar province, when entire aid shipments or thousands of police salaries are seized for private use, when world-record heroin exports take place under police watch, everyone in Afghanistan knows where to look.
On heavily guarded streets on the edge of every Afghan city and in the centre of Kabul are the large, wedding-cake houses, surrounded by walls and guards and filled with luxury goods, bu...
