EFTA00046963

ahead of Thursday's election. (Gizmodo) 
-- Personal animosity between Argentina's and Brazil's leaders is 
complicating the relationship between South America's largest 
economies. Marina Lopes reports: "As South America melts down —
Colombia the latest nation to erupt in mass protests, Bolivia searching 
for a consensus leader, Venezuela lurching into another year of 
economic, political and humanitarian crises - its two largest 
economies have been relative oases of calm, run by like-minded 
leaders cooperating on finance, trade and security. Now, the growing 
personal animosity between [Jair] Bolsonaro and [Alberto] Fernandez 
is threatening that stability. Bolsonaro, a right-wing populist, has called 
Fernandez and his vice president, 
Fernandez de Kirchner, 
`leftist bandits,' and said their election threatens the Mercosur regional 
trading bloc. Fernandez, a Peronista with ties to the region's leftists, 
has labeled Bolsonaro a misogynist and racist." 
A nativity scene depicting Jesus, Mary and 
as a refugee family separated was 
displayed Saturday at the Claremont United Methodist Church in California. (Rev. 
Karen 
Ristine) 
DOMESTIC DEVELOPMENTS THAT SHOULD NOT BE 
OVERSHADOWED: 
-- A nativity scene outside a church in Southern California 
displays Jesus, Mary and 
in cages, separated at the 
border. Kimberly Winston reports: "The nativity display from 
Claremont United Methodist Church, a suburban congregation east of 
Los Angeles, is raising both praise and ire for its depiction of the 
biblical story of Jesus's family fleeing to Egypt in the context of 
Page 17772 
EFTA00047283

controversial U.S. immigration policies. The nativity is meant to 
highlight the plight of migrants and refugees, a longtime cause for this 
300-member congregation, said the Rev. Karen IM Ristine, the 
church's senior pastor. ... Biblical interpretations suggest that after 
Jesus's birth, his parents took him to Egypt fearing King Herod would 
have him killed. ... Ristine rejected the notion of the nativity as a 
political statement. 'A nativity is the theological equivalent to public art, 
and the role of public art has always been to offer awareness,' she 
said. 'Jesus taught us kindness and mercy and the radical welcome of 
all people.-
-- The administration wants to expand migrant family detention, 
despite expert warnings. From the Times: "The administration wants 
to expand the system of secure facilities where migrant families can be 
incarcerated for months or longer. In late November, Justice 
Department lawyers appealed a federal judge's decision that blocked 
the government's attempt to eliminate a 20-day time limit on most 
family detentions. ... Facilities like the one at Dilley [Texas], which is 
run by the private prison company, CoreCivic, could multiply to 
incarcerate more than 15,000 parents and children across the country. 
... Research at existing family detention centers found 
heightened levels of stress, which can damage neurons and lead 
to smaller brain masses in children who have been detained for 
long periods." 
-- A county in North Dakota may become the first in the U.S. to 
bar new refugees after Trump issued an executive order making 
such a move possible. From the AP: "Reuben Panchol was forced to 
leave war-tom Sudan decades ago as a child, embarking on an 
odyssey that eventually brought him to the American Midwest and left 
Page 17773 
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him eternally grateful to the country that took him in. 'I am an 
American citizen, a North Dakotan,' said Panchol, a 38-year-old 
father of four. `And without North Dakota, I couldn't have made 
it.' Panchol hopes to share his story on Monday with members of a 
local commission who are set to vote on whether their county will stop 
accepting refugees. If they vote to bar refugees, as expected, Burleigh 
County — home to about 95,000 people and the capital city of 
Bismarck — could become the first local government to do so ... The 
county postponed a vote last week when more than 100 people 
showed up and overflowed the commission's normal meeting space. 
Monday night's meeting will be held in a middle school cafeteria to 
accommodate public interest that Chairman Brian Bitner said is the 
most intense he's seen in more than a decade on the commission. 
Though he declined to predict which way the commission would go, 
Bitner said he would vote against accepting additional refugees." 
-- Democrats used Trump's fixation on creating a Space Force to 
get a parental-leave policy that, if approved, would be the biggest 
victory for federal employees in nearly 30 years. Jeff Stein, Lisa 
Rein and Josh Dawsey report: "Some Democratic aides say the 
proposed federal benefits package would cost about $3 billion, though 
there is disagreement about whether those costs would span five or 10 
years. The expansion would give federal employees a rare victory after 
the Trump administration has sought to cut their benefits for three 
years. Many of them also endured the longest-ever government 
shutdown under the current administration about a year ago. 
Congressional Republicans were less determined to get the Space 
Force approved than the White House because it hadn't been a GOP 
priority before Trump took office. They were undercut by the Trump 
administration, as the president had told advisers he wanted to be able 
Page 17774 
EFTA00047285

to trumpet the creation of the Space Force as part of his reelection 
bid. The tentative agreement would fall short of what Democrats had 
hoped for: They wanted to secure paid leave not only for the birth, 
adoption or foster placement of a child, but also to care for a spouse, 
child or parent with a serious health condition or when a family member 
is deployed for military duty." 
-- Elizabeth Warren earned nearly $2 million working as a 
consultant for corporations and financial firms while she was a 
law professor at Harvard University, the University of 
Pennsylvania and other law schools, according to records her 
campaign abruptly released Sunday evening. Annie Linskey 
reports: "Her campaign had been asked repeatedly for the information 
and had declined to release it multiple times.Her work for some of the 
companies doesn't fit neatly with her current presidential campaign 
brand as a crusader against corporate interests.For instance, the 
documents released Sunday show that Warren made about $80,000 
from work she did for creditors in the energy company Enron's 
bankruptcy and $20,000 as a consultant for Dow Chemical, a 
company that was trying to limit the liability it faced from [faulty] 
silicone breast implants that were made by a connected firm. 
"Earlier this year, Warren had released a list of about 50 cases 
that she worked on, but the descriptions of the work were at 
times misleading and the amount of income and dates for her work 
were not included. While the cases released by Warren's campaign 
stretch over more than three decades, the figures disclosed Sunday 
show that nearly all of the money was made from cases filed after she 
got her job at Harvard in 1995. (Warren was elected to the Senate in 
2012.) The income includes about $212,000 for representing Travelers 
• 
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Page 17775 
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inaemnity uo. in zutm, ana 4).wu,uuu tor wnat ner campaign aescriaea 
as representing a chain of department stores owned by PA Bergner & 
Co. in the mid-1990s. ... Warren's campaign did not release 
compensation information for all of the cases, reporting in some 
instances — including a case involving First Commercial Bank — that 
'the campaign has no compensation records for this case.-
-- The brave new world: A geneticist at Harvard Medical School is 
working on an app that compares DNA between potential sexual 
partners and screens out matches that would result in a child 
with an inherited disease. "You wouldn't find out who you're not 
compatible with. You'll just find out who you are compatible with," the 
geneticist George Church told "60 Minutes" reporter Scott Pelley about 
his project many criticized as an experiment in eugenics. Church was 
one of the Harvard professors who met with convicted sex offender 
Jeffrey Epstein years before his jailing and death, meetings that have 
been presumably related to genetics research. Epstein donated $6.5 
million to Harvard's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics in 2003, per 
NBC News. 
-- One of President George M. Bush's grandsons will enter an 
already crowded GOP primary for a suburban Houston 
congressional seat. From the Texas Tribune: "Nonprofit executive 
Pierce Bush will announce his candidacy for Congress on Monday 
morning, according to an email written by his father, Neil Bush. Bush 
will enter an already crowded GOP primary for Texas' 22nd District, the 
suburban Houston-area seat retiring U.S. Rep. Pete Olson currently 
holds. The development is something of a surprise; Bush was 
considering running for the neighboring 7th Congressional District, a 
seat once held by his grandfather." 
Page 17776 
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SOCIAL MEDIA SPEED READ: 
The president went on a tweeting and retweeting spree last night, 
sharing more than 100 messages. The majority were attempts at 
discrediting the impeachment inquiry, but he made a passing comment 
about his time at the NATO summit last week: 
He seemed excited for today's FBI inspector general report: 
Protesters showed up at a Pete Buttigieg campaign event with posters 
pointing out his polling record with black voters: 
Joe Biden revealed that his son Beau, who passed away, was 
burdened by the cost of his education: 
Several presidential candidates marked the first anniversary of the 
death of Jakelin Caal Maquin, the 7-year-old who died in Border Patrol 
custody. Five more children have died in custody since then: 
Rep. Devin Nunes accused this man of stalking him without pointing 
out that he is a reporter for The Intercept who asked him about his 
calls to Giuliani associate Lev Parnas: 
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A Vanity Fair reporter weighed in on the powerful nativity scene outside 
a California church: 
The Kennedy Center Honors were last night, and "Sesame Street" was 
among those celebrated for lifetime achievement in the arts. Many of 
the long-running shods performers honored puppeteer Caroll Spinney, 
who died Sunday. Spinney gave life to Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch: 
QUOTE OF THE DAY: "I didn't plan on running 
this time. For real," Joe Biden said in New 
Hampshire. "I'd planned on running last time, but 
my son was dying." (Bloomberg News) 
VIDEOS OF THE DAY: 
"Saturday Night Live" envisioned what the NATO summit would've 
looked like in a high school cafeteria: 
The show also tried to answer the question: "How would the 
president's supporters respond to the impeachment inquiry if Trump 
were black?" 
Page 17778 
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"The Daily Show" correspondent Jaboukie Young-White tried to get in 
touch with the Founding Fathers to talk about impeachment: 
You received this email because you signed up for The Daily 202 or because it is included in your 
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From: 
Th Wn hin 
n Post <[email protected]> 
To: 
Subject: 
The Daily 202: The Afghanistan Papers show the corrosive consequences of letting corruption go unchecked 
Sent: 
Mon, 9 Dec 2019 15:41:49 +0000 
If you're having trouble reading this, click here. 
Share: 
IllListen to The Big Idea 
The Afghanistan Papers show the corrosive 
consequences of letting corruption go unchecked 
Exclusive: A secret history of the war in Afghanistan, revealed 
BYE 
HOHMANN 
with Mariana Alfaro 
THE BIG IDEA: A toxic 
of U.S. government policies, under the administrations 
of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, directly contributed to Afghanistan's 
descent into one of the world's most corrupt countries. 
U.S. leaders said publicly that they had no tolerance for corruption in Afghanistan, but 
that was one of several topics related to the war effort on which they systematically 
misled the public, according to a trove of confidential government interviews obtained by 
The Washington Post. 
American representatives often looked the other way at egregious and brazen graft, so 
long as the offenders were considered allies. Congress appropriated vast sums of 
money, which was handed out with little oversight or recordkeeping. The ensuing greed 
EFTA00047295

and corruption undermined the legitimacy of the nascent government and helped make 
the ground more fertile for the Taliban's resurgence. 
"The basic assumption was that corruption is an Afghan problem and we are the 
solution. But there is one indispensable ingredient for corruption — money — and we 
were the ones who had the money," said Barnett Rubin, a former senior State 
Department adviser and a New York University professor. 
The adage is as true in Afghanistan as America: Follow the money. 
"Our biggest single project, sadly and inadvertently, of course, may have been the 
development of mass corruption," said Ryan Crocker, who twice served as the top U.S. 
diplomat in Kabul, in 2002 and again from 2011 to 2012. "Once it gets to the level I saw, 
when I was out there, it's somewhere between unbelievably hard and outright impossible 
to fix it. ... The corruption was so entrenched and so much a part of the lifestyle of the 
establishment writ broadly..." 
Crocker told interviewers from the government that he felt "a sense of futility": "I was 
struck by something [then-president Hamid] Karzai said and repeated a number of times 
during my tenure, which is that the West, led by the U.S., in his clear view, had a 
significant responsibility to bear for the whole corruption issue," he explained. "I always 
thought Karzai had a point, that you just cannot put those amounts of money into a very 
fragile state and society, and not have it fuel corruption. ... You just can't." 
— The comments from Crocker and Rubin are included among more than 2,000 
pages of previously private notes from research conducted by U.S. government 
investigators. More than 400 people who played a direct role in the war, from 
generals to diplomats and aid workers, were questioned about what went 
wrong. The interviews were conducted by the Office of the Special Inspector General for 
Afghanistan Reconstruction between 2014 and 2018 for a "Lessons Learned" project. A 
report outlined the conclusions in broad brushstrokes in 2016, but a lot of the most 
noteworthy material was held back. The Post has fought a three-year legal battle, which 
is ongoing, to get these documents out under the Freedom of Information Act so that the 
American people can see for themselves what's been going on. 
EFTA00047296

John Sopko, the head of the federal agency that conducted the interviews, 
acknowledged in an interview with 
Whitlock that the records show "the American 
people have constantly been lied to." Whitlock has written a six-part series dissecting all 
the documents. (You can start with Part One here.) 
Watch: The Post's full interview with Inspector General John Sopko 
-- A key theme underlying many of the most candid interviews is that a short-term 
focus on maintaining security led to compromises that started small but became 
bigger and bigger. It's a cautionary tale that can be cross-applied to a host of other 
challenges facing the United States. 
Gert Berthold, a forensic accountant who served on a military task force in Afghanistan 
from 2010 to 2012, analyzed 3,000 Defense Department contracts worth $106 billion. He 
said they calculated that about 40 percent of the money ended up in the pockets of 
insurgents, criminal syndicates or corrupt Afghan officials. But former government 
ministers told them it was higher. Berthold said few U.S. officials wanted to hear about 
the evidence they uncovered: "No one wanted accountability," he said. "If you're 
going to do anti-corruption, someone has got to own it. From what I've seen, no one is 
willing to own it." 
Christopher Kolenda, a retired Army colonel who deployed to Afghanistan several times 
and advised three U.S. generals in charge of the war, said the Afghan government led 
by Karzai had "self-organized into a kleptocracy" by 2006. "I like to use a cancer 
analogy," the colonel told his government interviewers. "Petty corruption is like skin 
cancer; there are ways to deal with it and you'll probably be just fine. Corruption within 
the ministries, higher level, is like colon cancer; it's worse, but if you catch it in time, 
you're probably ok. Kleptocracy, however, is like brain cancer; it's fatal." 
— A lot of important information is still being concealed by the government. While 
the agency has turned over previously unpublished notes and transcripts from 428 of 
EFTA00047297

more than 600 interviews that were conducted, these documents identify only 62 of the 
people who were interviewed by their names. The names of 366 others are blacked out. 
A decision by a federal judge is pending in response to a motion to disclose the other 
names. But The Post chose to publish what it has now, instead of waiting for the judge to 
rule on the rest, because these records could contribute to the civic discourse over 
President Trump's negotiations with the Taliban and the debate over whether to 
withdraw the 13,000 U.S. troops who remain in Afghanistan, which has become a 
flashpoint in the 2020 campaign. 
The Post attempted to contact for comment everyone whom it was able to identify as 
having given an interview as part of the project. (Their responses are compiled here.) 
-- Here are five of the most striking quotes about corruption from people whose 
identities are still redacted in the interview summaries: 
1. An unnamed senior U.S. diplomat said the early years were "a dark space" with "not 
much documentation" about who we were giving cash. "We had partnerships with all the 
wrong players," this diplomat lamented during an interview in August 2015. "The U.S. is 
still standing shoulder-to-shoulder with these people, even through all these years. It's a 
case of security trumping everything else." 
2. From another unnamed senior U.S. official: "Our money was empowering a lot of bad 
people. There was massive resentment among the Afghan people. And we were the 
most corrupt here, so had no credibility on the corruption issue." 
3. From a former National Security Council staffer: "In the beginning, the military kept 
saying that corruption was an unfortunate short-term side effect then toward the end the 
feeling was 'Oh, my God, this could derail the whole thing.-
4. An unnamed State Department official said that U.S. officials were "so desperate to 
have the alcoholics to the table, we kept pouring drinks, not knowing [or] considering we 
were killing them." This person said that the Americans "had no red lines" for cutting off 
corrupt partners. "We didn't spend the money effectively and didn't consider the 
implications," this person told government interviewers. "We wanted to keep the country 
EFTA00047298

afloat, not to let the country be a safe haven for the Taliban and al Qaeda." 
5. An unidentified government contractor said his job was to distribute $3 million in 
taxpayer money each day for projects in an Afghan district roughly the size of a U.S. 
county. He recalled asking a visiting congressman whether the lawmaker could 
responsibly spend that kind of money back home: "He said hell no. 'Well, sir, that's what 
you just obligated us to spend and I'm doing it for communities that live in mud huts with 
no windows.'" 
Presidents say the U.S. is not nation-building in Afghanistan 
- So often, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Chapter four of 
Whitlock's six-part series is a narrative, as told through these interviews, of how 
Afghanistan became consumed by corruption: "About halfway into the 18-year war, 
Afghans stopped hiding how corrupt their country had become. Dark money sloshed all 
around. Afghanistan's largest bank liquefied into a cesspool of fraud. Travelers lugged 
suitcases loaded with $1 million, or more, on flights leaving Kabul. ... Karzai won 
reelection after cronies stuffed thousands of ballot boxes. He later admitted the CIA had 
delivered bags of cash to his office for years, calling it 'nothing unusual.' ... According to 
the interviews, the CIA, the U.S. military, the State Department and other agencies used 
cash and lucrative contracts to win the allegiance of Afghan warlords in the fight against 
al-Qaeda and the Taliban. 
"In 2002 and 2003, when Afghan tribal councils gathered to write a new 
constitution, the U.S. government gave `nice packages' to delegates who 
supported Washington's preferred stance on human rights and women's rights, 
according to a U.S. official who served in Kabul at the time. 'The perception that was 
started in that period: If you were going to vote for a position that [Washington] favored, 
you'd be stupid to not get a package for doing it,' the unnamed official told government 
EFTA00047299

interviewers. By the time Afghanistan held parliamentary elections in 2005, that 
perception had hardened. Lawmakers realized their votes could be worth thousands of 
dollars to the Americans, even for legislation they would have backed anyway ... 'People 
would tell each other, so-and-so has just been to the U.S. Embassy and got this money. 
They said 'ok now I need to go," the U.S. official said. 'So from the beginning, their 
experience with democracy was one in which money was deeply embedded.-
"On Aug. 20, 2009, Afghans went to the polls to choose a president. ... Right away, 
reports surfaced of electoral fraud on an epic scale — ghost voting, official 
miscounting, ballot-box stuffing, plus violence and intimidation at the polls. Initial results 
showed Karzai, the incumbent, had won. But his opponents, and many independent 
observers, accused his side of trying to steal the election. A U.N.-backed panel 
investigated and determined Karzai had received about 1 million illegal votes, a quarter 
of all those cast. The outcome put Obama administration officials in a box. They had 
said corruption was intolerable but also had promised to respect Afghan sovereignty and 
not interfere with the election. Moreover, they did not want to completely alienate Karzai. 
If there was another vote, many saw him as the likely victor anyway. In the end, the 
Obama administration brokered a deal in which Karzai was declared the winner after he 
agreed to share some power with his main rival. ... 
"Peter Galbraith, a Karzai critic who served as a deputy U.N. envoy to Afghanistan in 
2009, was removed from his post after he complained that the United Nations was 
helping cover up the extent of the election fraud. An American, Galbraith told 
government interviewers that the U.S. government also stood by when Karzai appointed 
cronies to election boards and anti-corruption posts." 
Afghan women walk past a large portrait of then-President Hamid Karzai in Kabul in 2004. (Emilio 
Morenatti/AP) 
It got worse in 2010: "Kabul Bank, the country's biggest, nearly collapsed under 
the weight of $1 billion in fraudulent loans — an amount equal to one-twelfth of the 
country's entire economic output the year before. The Afghan government engineered 
EFTA00047300

an emergency bailout to stem a run on the bank as angry crowds lined up to withdraw 
their savings. Investigators soon determined Kabul Bank had falsified its books to hide 
hundreds of millions of dollars in unsecured loans to politically connected business 
executives, including the president's brother Mahmoud Karzai and the family of Fahim 
Khan, the warlord then serving as the country's first vice president. 'On a scale of one to 
10, it was a 20 here,' an unnamed U.S. Treasury Department official posted to Kabul as 
an Afghan government adviser told interviewers. 'It had elements that you could put into 
a spy novel, and the connections between people who owned Kabul Bank and those 
who run the country.' ... 
"At first, in public and in private, the Obama administration leaned on Karzai to fully 
investigate the Kabul Bank scandal — not only to recover the stolen money but also to 
demonstrate to the Afghan people that no one was above the law. ... For about a year 
after the scandal became public, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, led by then-
Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, made the case a top priority and pressed Karzai to 
take action, three former officials told government interviewers. But they said the 
embassy backed off after Eikenberry was replaced by Ryan Crocker in July 2011. 
... Crocker, as well as U.S. military commanders and others in Washington, did not want 
to risk alienating Karzai, because they needed his support as tens of thousands of 
additional U.S. soldiers arrived in the war zone. They also said Crocker and his allies did 
not want Congress or international donors to use the bank scandal as an excuse to cut 
off aid to Kabul." 
— I spent much of this weekend reviewing more than a thousand reader emails 
about the biggest storylines of the 2010s. There are so many thoughtful and 
interesting answers that I'm excited to highlight in the coming days. I'm grateful to 
everyone who responded, but I'm also struck by how few of you mentioned Afghanistan. 
It's not just America's longest war, but also perhaps its most forgotten while combat 
operations are still underway. Whatever your politics, the Afghanistan Papers are worthy 
of your time and attention. After all, those who don't learn from the mistakes of the past 
are doomed to repeat them. 
EFTA00047301

Subscribe on Amazon Echo Google Home Apple HomePod and other podcast 
players. 
Welcome to the Daily 202, PowerPost's morning briefing for 
decision-makers. 
Sign up to receive the newsletter. 
Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker reading the financial page as he waits for a hearing in 1980.
K. W. Atherton/The Washington Post) 
WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING: 
— Paul Volcker, a hard-headed economic statesman who as chairman of the 
Federal Reserve from 1979 to 1987 shocked the U.S. economy out of a cycle of 
inflation and malaise and so set the stage for a generation of prosperity, died Dec. 
8 at his home in Manhattan. He was 92. The cause was complications from prostate 
cancer, said his daughter, Janice Zima. "With influence that spanned five decades and 
seven presidents, Mr. Volcker left as deep an imprint on the U.S. economy and financial 
system as has anyone of his generation," Neil Irwin writes in his obituary. "As a senior 
Treasury official in the 1960s and early '70s, he advised President Richard M. Nixon on 
taking the United States off the gold standard. At the Fed, he was arguably the second-
most-powerful person in the country. ... He later counseled President Obama on his 
response to the 2008 financial crisis and proposed a key restriction on speculative 
activity by banks that would become known as the 'Volcker Rule.' 
— The White House and House Democrats are on the cusp of finalizing a new trade 
deal for North America, a major achievement for Trump and House Speaker Nancy 
Pelosi that comes even as Democrats prepare to impeach the president. "A key 
EFTA00047302