Why the U.S. Paid Karzai's Top Aide --- The chief of staff to Afghanistan’s president drew a salary from two U.S. government contractors in 2002 and early 2003 as he was managing President Hamid Karzai’s office, serving as his spokesman and advising him on foreign affairs, according to documents reviewed by The Daily Beast and subsequent interviews. --- The contractor salary provided to Said Jawad was part of a U.S. initiative to directly pay high salaries to Western-educated Afghans who helped rebuild a government from scratch in the midst of an ongoing civil war and foreign occupation. --- This disclosure of the program to pay Afghanistan’s top bureaucrats through U.S. contractors comes as the United States is urging Karzai to sign an agreement setting the terms of U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan after 2014. That is the year the current arrangement, first negotiated in 2002 and 2003, for the presence of U.S. troops in Afghanistan will expire. The existing terms were originally spelled out in an exchange of letters between the United States and Afghanistan, and are considered by most experts to be favorable to the United States. For example, the current arrangement does not require the United States to compensate the families of civilians killed in U.S. military operations. --- In 2002, Karzai trusted Jawad. Soon after being hired by Karzai, he was promoted to chief of staff and placed in charge of international relations for the office of the president. In 2003, Jawad was named Afghanistan’s ambassador to the United States. He stayed in that post until 2010. --- Andrew Natsios, who at the time was the administrator for USAID, said of Jawad: “We recruited him in 2002 at first to be the media spokesperson for Hamid Karzai to increase the frequency of the President's communication with the Afghan people.” -- Jawad was by no means the only Afghan technocrat to benefit from such arrangements, according to current and former top USAID officials. Natsios said that in the early days of the Afghanistan war, USAID had a program to recruit hundreds of highly trained Afghans living in the West to become technocrats in Karzai’s government to build government capacity. Part of this program, Natsios said, involved providing salaries competitive with their jobs in the West. “These technocrats were recruited through the USAID contractors and served as officials in line ministries,” he said. “The early way we had to carry out our programs was through these kinds of contracts. We did this quietly because there was tension between the Afghan expatriates returning and the Afghan militias allied with us.” --- Larry Sampler, the current USAID Assistant Administrator for Afghanistan and Pakistan, said these types of transactions were a necessity during the initial phases of Afghanistan’s reconstruction. “If the U.S. policy interest was a functioning interim Afghanistan administration, USAID would look for ways to creatively support that. That might include using one of our contract mechanisms to provide temporary salary support to attract qualified employees. To my recollection, in 2002, I’m familiar with about half a dozen people for whom we did that,” he said. “We would do this for high impact players who were essential for the new administration.” -- Given that the interim government of Afghanistan was only months old when some of these men were hired, Karzai’s team actually expected and depended on the Western donors to provide a reliable salary until such time as the interim government could do so, Sampler said. - More, The Daily Beast, at: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/12/18/how-the-u-s-paid-top-karzai-aide.html#url=/articles/2013/12/18/how-the-u-s-paid-top-karzai-aide.html