The CIA's Bags Of Cash

The Real Costs of CIA Cash | Human Rights Watch: 

"The CIA has a long history of using cash to buy allegiance in Afghanistan. A retired CIA officer once told me unabashedly over lunch at the Cosmos Club in Washington of payments in the late 1990s to the anti-Taliban leader Ahmed Shah Massoud. As Human Rights Watch's Afghanistan researcher ten years ago, I saw firsthand how the CIA paved the way with cash during the military campaign against the Taliban in late 2001. While investigating abuses by a warlord named Ismail Khan in western Afghanistan, I learned the CIA had provided him with enough cash and weapons that he was soon in control of this part of the country (which also gave him control of 70 percent of national revenue derived from customs taxes on the Iranian border). Khan became so powerful that he soon called himself the "Emir of Herat.""