Journalist Matthieu Aikins reports on the financial front of America's occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, where a flood of cash buys temporary peace but creates long term problems - from destabilizing corruption to enemies on the payroll, and explains why American foreign policy needs a radical re-imagining if the government hopes to create stability abroad.

Matthieu wrote the New Yorker piece The Bidding War: How a young Afghan military contractor became spectacularly rich.