Ten Words from Today's Times - Mar. 8, 2012

Headline: Intractable Afghan Graft Hampering U.S.

The limits of the coalition’s efforts to police its own spending — and the newfound reluctance of top American officials to push back against Afghan intransigence over prosecuting corruption — were laid bare in December when Mr. Karzai’s office demanded that the coalition provide evidence if it wanted the government to prosecute the Afghan Army’s former surgeon general, Gen. Ahmad Zia Yaftali.

The Obama campaign does not claim to be reinventing the wheel; as in 2008, it is in many ways emulating the 2004 Bush campaign, which had a similar focus on building a volunteer army and highly focused and individualized messages for potential volunteers, donors and voters using personal data.

Leticia Parra, a mother of five scraping by on income from her husband’s sporadic construction jobs, relied on the Planned Parenthood clinic in San Carlos, an impoverished town in South Texas, for breast cancer screenings, free birth control pills and pap smears for cervical cancer.

For decades, as autocrats ruled their neighbors, the Palestinians were at the center of Middle Eastern politics, their struggle with Israeli occupation embodying the Arab longing for post-colonial freedom and dignity.

But now, as momentum for a peaceful two-state solution fades, and the effort at the United Nations remains stymied, no viable alternatives have emerged and attention has focused on other conflicts.

Meanwhile, the distractions in the Arab world along with Israeli maneuvers have contributed to a worsening fiscal crisis for the Palestinian Authority even as the private sector here builds a modern infrastructure, creating a small but impressive business class.

Intractable Afghan Graft Hampering U.S.

As Americans pull back from Afghanistan, Mr. Farnood’s case exemplifies how the United States is leaving behind a problem it underwrote over the past decade with tens of billions of dollars of aid and logistical support: a narrow business and political elite defined by its corruption, and despised by most Afghans for it.

Efforts by the American-led coalition to better monitor the billions it spends each year in Afghanistan continue and are having an effect, although it remains slight largely because billions of dollars keep pouring in and are likely to do so for years to come.