KIM BARKER is Edward R. Murrow Press Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Part I: Corruption

In his inauguration speech, Afghan President Hamid Karzai stressed the importance of the country's fight against corruption and spoke of his commitment to ending "the culture of impunity and violations of law." Afghans, however, reacted warily: they are waiting to see action, which has been in short supply in Afghanistan. Corruption has grown around Karzai like a fungus, touching almost every ministry and office. As Karzai begins his new term, this pervasive culture of graft is blamed for driving a wedge between Afghans and their government -- even driving some toward the Taliban.

Western officials have demanded that the Afghan government take decisive action against corruption, but such pressure may be counterproductive. Karzai has grown increasingly resentful of Western criticism, both because such treatment comes across as disrespectful in Pashtun culture and because Karzai believes that standing up to the United States will make him more popular with Afghans. Pressuring Karzai too often simply pushes him into a defensive crouch.

In a television interview in early November, a week after his former challenger Abdullah Abdullah dropped out of the presidential race, effectively canceling the runoff, Karzai appeared vague about corruption inside his government and seemed to view it as a phenomenon inflicted from the outside. He blamed overseas interests for waste, saying that much of the country's corruption stems from large contracts initiated by foreign governments and companies. "For that sort of corruption, it's the international community that also shares responsibility with us," he said.

For Afghans, corruption falls into three categories: first is petty corruption by lower-level government employees who are looking out for their own survival. Next is large-scale corruption, which is committed by ministers and relatives of top Afghan officials involved in lucrative international contracts or the drug trade. Last is what Karzai described as Western-driven corruption, which begins with the foreign contractors who live conspicuously well in Kabul. They subcontract out work to local Afghans, who then make their own subcontracts with other Afghans. The end result is that the bulk of every aid dollar is wasted. But this, at least by Western standards, is technically legal -- a seeming loophole that many Afghans find absurd, if not hypocritical and offensive.

Making the problem worse is that the Afghan government has few successful examples on which to model a fight against corruption. Karzai and other officials have called for the creation of an anticorruption court that would be similar to the country's drug court -- which has been ineffective at best, if not corrupt itself. The drug court has sentenced only a handful of major players; of those, Karzai pardoned several earlier this year, in a move that caused U.S. officials to pull their hair in frustration. And Mohammad Alim Hanif, one of the few reputedly clean judges on the court, was shot dead more than a year ago. His murder remains unsolved.

Corruption in the country has reached such a scale that Ashraf Ghani, a former World Bank executive and presidential candidate, says that a senior Karzai adviser told him that one government minister made $25 million in a single year, and a northern governor, $75 million. Two of Karzai's brothers -- Mahmoud Karzai and Ahmed Wali Karzai -- and relatives of at least one governor, Gul Agha Shirzai, and the country's defense minister, Abdul Rahim Wardak, have either earned money with questionable tactics or been awarded lucrative Western contracts with little fair competition. They have been helped by their relatives' political clout and suspicious bidding practices.

Some of the shifting public support toward the Taliban is due to the fact that the Taliban, unlike the central government, seem to take such widespread corruption seriously. In 33 of the country's 34 provinces, the Taliban has set up its own anticorruption committees, which allow local Afghans to complain about any injustice, including those inflicted by the Taliban. One Afghan official told me that such committees would be "a good idea" for the government. The Taliban also runs its own courts, which are known for quick justice without the need to pay bribes.

But for now, paying money remains the only way to efficiently accomplish anything with the Afghan government. Daniel Grey, the local head of a large U.S. contracting company that works on roads and power, said that his company refuses to pay bribes. As a result, its work is made more onerous and ultimately more expensive. In one case, the customs department held 13 vehicles for a year before releasing them. Another time, in Kandahar, when Grey's company was trying to load supplies onto a helicopter that costs $16,000 an hour to operate, an Afghan official came over to say that the helicopter would have to be loaded somewhere else. That cost the company an hour of time, or $16,000. But the official just wanted a $100 kickback. "The cost of avoiding a bribe was much more than we ever would have paid for a bribe," Grey said.

Government employees ask for the money with a smile and a rub of an index finger and a thumb. "Shirini?" they sometimes ask, using the Dari word for "sweets," or maybe baksheesh, the word for "tip." Abdul Rahim Chakari, who works at the Ministry of Information and Culture, admitted to me that he takes bribes. "Everyone is miserable," he told me. "I am paid $75 a month. If I don't get bribes, how am I supposed to live?" Just feeding himself and his family, he said, costs $200 a month.