The NY Times on those "wads of American dollars packed into suitcases, backpacks and, on occasion, plastic shopping bags [that] have been dropped off every month or so at the offices of Afghanistan’s president":
[The C.I.A.'s] main goal in providing the cash has been to maintain access to Mr. Karzai and his inner circle and to guarantee the agency’s influence at the presidential palace....
[M]uch of the C.I.A.’s money goes to paying off warlords and politicians, many of whom have ties to the drug trade and, in some cases, the Taliban....
Some of the cash also probably ends up in the pockets of the Karzai aides who handle it....
That is not a significant concern for the C.I.A., said American officials familiar with the agency’s operations.
Once you get over the ghastly obscenity of more than 2,000 American lives having so far proved insufficient to "maintain access" to the palace, you're left only with the Kennedy-era-like comedy of bribes, corruption, criminal conspiracies and systemic depravity being of "[in]significant concern for the C.I.A."
And it's such a shock, too. Who would have guessed that this medieval arena of misogynistic oppression, religious superstition, sectarian bloodletting and endless tribal warring would have been unamenable to the parlor-room splendors of the Enlightenment?