KABUL - The message to the young man applying for a job at Kandahar city's customs office was unequivocal: 100,000 Pakistani rupees and the post is yours.
But he couldn't afford the bribe. So he begged and borrowed from friends and family until he was able to scrape together enough money to buy the job.
"I became very frustrated," said the man, who asked that his name not be published for fear of reprisals.
"In this country, money is everything and education is valueless."
Similar tales of graft emerged over the course of more than a dozen interviews with current and former Afghan politicians, government officials, and Afghans living in Kabul and Kandahar province.
Corroborating the allegations is tricky, since such illicit dealings don't leave a paper trail. But it's largely taken as a given in Afghanistan that every position of power -- from the lowliest job in the civil service straight up to provincial governorships and cabinet posts -- is available for the right price.
"It's an auction," said Fawzia Koofi, an Afghan parliamentarian from the skillet-shaped province of Badakhshan that borders Tajikistan and China.
Shady middlemen solicit those seeking plum postings, say insiders familiar with the process. Sometimes these middlemen work in government ministries, but more often they are outsiders, proxies for corrupt officials.
Then, they divvy up the booty. Each crooked party gets a cut.
"How much income they would get from (selling) that post, according to that, they fix the price," said Shekeba Hashimi, an MP from Kandahar province.
Prices vary depending on the job and its location. A prospective provincial police chief might pay between US$30,000 and $50,000. Would-be district leaders pay anywhere from US$10,000 to $30,000. The price to govern some Afghan provinces is reputed to be about US$100,000.
Several current and former parliamentarians, who claim to have first-hand knowledge of the scheme, affirmed these prices. They include Mir Muhammad Mafouz Nedai, a former interim minister of mines and industries in Afghan President Hamid Karzai's cabinet, and Malalai Ishaqzai, an MP from the Panjwaii district of Kandahar province.
"This is true," said Mohammad Amin Farhang, another former cabinet minister in Karzai's government, when told of the posting prices.
"It depends on the people, what amounts they demand. But it happens, it happens."
Afghan parliamentarians voted in December to strip Farhang of his post as commerce minister for failing to control Afghanistan's skyrocketing gas prices. He insists he was hamstrung by crooked subordinates who refused to follow his orders.
Speaking in French to The Canadian Press in the sitting room of his Kabul home, Farhang claimed he was frequently asked for bribes as commerce minister, often for routine tasks.
"In the blood of the government the corruption is very, very bad. People can't do anything without paying money."
That corruption besets Afghanistan should come as no surprise, as many fledgling governments fall prey to it. What is alarming is the brazenness with which it prevails.
Afghans derisively call the routine bribes paid to expedite services "baksheesh" -- the Persian word for tipping. Another Persian word, "reshwat," describes corruption of a higher order, such as buying government jobs.
The director general of the Afghan government's anti-corruption department, Mohammed Yosin Osmani, acknowledged that baksheesh is endemic in Afghanistan but denied that jobs are for sale.
"In most of the offices in Afghanistan, there are different kinds of corruptions. Petty corruptions, major corruptions," he said.
"When government employees deliver services for their clients, they will ask for some bribes. This kind of bribery or corruption is very common.... It happens sometimes that unqualified people will be elected or will be appointed. But the post is not sold. The post is not in the market."
Corruption pervades all levels of Afghan government.
The chief of the Kabul police force's criminal investigation department, Gen. Ali Shah Khan Paktiawal, said a recent three-month sting netted 29 people allegedly profiting from bribery.
Some of those charged worked as "low level" civil servants in Kabul's municipal government, Paktiawal said between drags of Marlboro Reds, while others were middlemen who collected bribes.
Karzai publicly acknowledged the corruption corroding his government when he spoke at a rural development conference in the Afghan capital of Kabul in November 2007.
"All politicians in this system have acquired everything -- money, lots of money. God knows, it is beyond the limit. The banks of the world are full of the money of our statesmen," he said at the time.
"The luxurious houses (built in Afghanistan in the past five years) belong to members of the government and Parliament, not only in Kabul, but here and there. Every one of them have three or four houses in different countries. ...
"Unfortunately, I see now that they did not learn the lessons of the past. They should know that the Afghan people will rise against us (if corruption continues)."
Yet, more than a year later, tales of bribery and graft still prevail across Afghanistan.
One student says officials at the Ministry of Higher Education demanded she pay US$5,000 to transfer to Kabul University from a university in Nangarhar province, near the border with Pakistan, to be closer to her family -- a request that, by law, should not have carried any cost.
The student, who asked not to be identified because her relatives work for the government, ended up paying US$2,000 for the transfer after a well-connected family member intervened on her behalf.
In Kandahar city, a man leaving the passport office said one of the agents inside demanded 12,000 Afghanis to process his application, which had been stalled for weeks.
"I paid the money to the agent, and the next day my passport was given to me," he said.
The government is doing what it can to ferret out corruption, Osmani said.
Within a month, the procedure for issuing vehicle permits will be streamlined. What used to take two months, several visits and up to 10,000 Afghanis in bribes will now take two days, he said. There are similar plans for the country's passport offices.
But with a staff of only 50, all based in Kabul, there are those who doubt the anti-corruption department will succeed. Osmani takes a long view.
"This corruption is the outcome of 30 years' war in Afghanistan. It is spread all over the country. Of course fighting against the corruption and preventing the corruption takes time."
