by Bruno Korschek

Created on: October 10, 2010

I am constantly amazed at the amount of corruption that tends to follow our political class around, both on our domestic shores and overseas. Consider a story that appeared in the September 24, 2010 issue of The Week Magazine entitled, "The Fight Against Corruption In Afghanistan." According to the article:

- Afghan President Hamid Karzai has recently blocked several investigations of graft in his administration.

- There have been ongoing complaints of corruption related to members of his government including his two half brothers who are allegedly involved with drug trafficking, bribery, and smuggling cash out of the country.

- Karzai recently freed one of his senior aides from prison who had been arrested on corruption charges.

- A recent in-country survey in Afghanistan found that 70% of those Afghans surveyed said that their local government officials are engaged in drug trafficking.

In return for this web of corruption and deceit from the Afghan government, the United States taxpayer expends roughly $100 billion a year and many dead American soldiers trying to get this situation right. Who should one be more mad at, the Afghan government officials and crooks who get away with this theft or the American political class that allows them to get away with it.

Another article on foreign corruption of U.S. taxpayer money comes from a New York Times article that appeared in the St. Petersburg Times on September 26, 2010, "Corruption Gobbles Up Gifts To Children." This article reviewed a program that the U.S. political class put in place to get almost 8,100 laptop computers into the hands of Iraqi children. The computers' value was estimate to be $1.8 million. The laptops arrived in Iraq last February but were not distributed right away.

While trying to track them down, it became known that in August, 4,200 of them had been auctioned off by some Iraqis for $45,700. The location of the other 3,900 computers was unknown at that time and still unknown today. Now, the article does acknowledge that ten government-employed customs people have been arrested in this case. However, seven months after the taxpayer funded computers landed in country, not a single on has been distributed to an Iraqi child and the location of the computers has apparently not been determined.

These are just two of the myriad of corruption instances that the American taxpayer has paid for in both war zones, Iraq and Afghanistan. And, as always, there does not appear to have been any person in

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