NEW YORK - A leading US newspaper Friday focused on corruption in Afghanistan, saying that the menace is contributing to the collapse of public confidence in President Hamid Karzai's government and to the resurgence of the Taliban, whose fighters have moved to the outskirts of Kabul. "The state built on the ruins of the Taliban government seven years ago now often seems to exist for little more than the enrichment of those who run it," The New York Times said in a front-page dispatch. Graft is contributing to the recent rise of the Taliban, according to the newspaper, which describes some of the bribes that average Afghans have to pay just to get basic services. "Everything seems to be for sale: public offices, access to government services, even a person's freedom. The examples mentioned above - $25,000 to settle a lawsuit, $6,000 to bribe the police, $100,000 to secure a job as a provincial police chief - were offered by people who experienced them directly or witnessed the transaction," the paper reports. "People pay bribes for large things, and for small things, too: to get electricity for their homes, to get out of jail, even to enter the airport." Transparency International says Afghanistan is considered one of the world's most corrupt countries. "Kept afloat by billions of dollars in American and other foreign aid, the government of Afghanistan is shot through with corruption and graft," The Times said in the dispatch from Kabul. "From the lowliest traffic policeman to the family of President Hamid Karzai himself, the state built on the ruins of the Taliban government seven years ago now often seems to exist for little more than the enrichment of those who run it. "A raft of investigations has concluded that people at the highest levels of the Karzai administration, including President Karzai's own brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, are cooperating in the country's opium trade, now the world's largest. In the streets and government offices, hardly a public transaction seems to unfold here that does not carry with it the requirement of a bribe, a gift, or, in case you are a beggar, "harchee" - whatever you have in your pocket... "The decay of the Afghan government presents President-elect Barack Obama with perhaps his most underappreciated challenge as he tries to reverse the course of the war here. Mr. Obama may be required to save the Afghan government not only from the Taliban insurgency - committing thousands of additional American soldiers to do so - but also from itself", the dispatch added. "This government has lost the capacity to govern because a shadow government has taken over," Ashraf Ghani, a former Afghan finance minister, was quoted as saying by The Times. He quit that job in 2004, he said, because the state had been taken over by drug traffickers. "The narco-mafia state is now completely consolidated," he said.