Zemarai Bashary, spokesman of the Afghan interior ministry, sat in a large chair in his top-floor meeting room in Kabul and dispensed sticky cakes and tea to his guests. Bashary wears a sharp suit and a winning smile. Along with narcotics, corruption is the main political issue facing Afghanistan, he said, and there can be no doubt that the battle against graft is being won.
Bashary cited two recent, high-profile examples of justice visited upon the venal. One concerned an Afghan army colonel in Kandahar who was jailed for 20 years for drug trafficking. The other investigation, even more sensational, netted a police general who was accused of stealing salaries and compensation payments due to the families of officers killed in the line of duty.
In days gone by, such abuses would not have been exposed, let alone prosecuted, Bashary said. Now no one is immune — if warranted, the most senior ministers and officials face scrutiny from the new major crime taskforce. Even his own ministry, led by Afghan Interior Minister Mohammad Hanif Atmar, could in theory be investigated. Luckily, there is no need for this, he said, because there is no corruption there.
It’s probably fair to say this is a minority view. The independent anti-corruption watchdog Integrity Watch Afghanistan, the ministries of interior, justice and public works have been notorious in the past. Everyone, from top politicians close to Afghan President Hamid Karzai to ill-paid, drug-addicted police recruits manning rural checkpoints, is vulnerable to often well-founded accusations of graft.
What the US, Britain and other western countries involved in Afghanistan since 2001 have failed to realize is that corruption goes to the heart of what comprises the Afghan “state,” an influential Afghan analyst said.
It was not simply a marginal problem, to be rooted out and eliminated. Overcoming it may require a societal revolution greater than that which toppled the Taliban in 2001, he said.
“I think corruption is a far more nefarious problem than most people recognize and unless it is tackled urgently and aggressively, there is no hope of turning things around in Afghanistan,” he said. “It has cut into foreign aid, undermined the government’s legitimacy, enriched the warlords, empowered the insurgents and generally affected the whole society.”
Western leaders have been bombarding Karzai’s government with “advice” on tackling the problem since the recent fraudulent presidential election threatened to eviscerate their Afghan policy.
New official bodies are proliferating. In addition to the High Office of Oversight and Anti-Corruption set up last year, the Major Crime Taskforce was promulgated last month, backed by the FBI, Scotland Yard and EUPOL (the EU’s police training mission). On Tuesday, Karzai opened a three-day anti-corruption conference in Kabul.
Lorenzo Delesgues, director of Integrity Watch, however, said the task was enormous and western aid donors needed to put their own houses in order, too.
“The Taliban are seen as corrupt by only 9 percent of the population, while Karzai’s government is seen by the majority as the most corrupt in 40 years,” Delesgues said.
The election fiasco apart, corrupt land grabs, infrastructure project kickbacks and bribes demanded by the police (which disproportionately affected poorer people) were particularly damaging to public confidence, he said. Aid donors had to be much more careful how their money was disbursed, too, a point accepted last week by US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.
It has been estimated that US$0.50 in every US$1 in foreign aid is lost to corrupt or fraudulent practices — that figure had risen to US$0.90 for some USAid programs, Delesgues said.
US accounting was improving and Britain had been more successful than most in keeping track of its cash, he said.
“They [the West] are just waking up to the problem. It can get better, but not in 18 months,” Delesgues said, referring to Barack Obama’s surge timeline. “This should be a lesson for any future conflict — corruption is one of the main things you must deal with when you make an intervention. If you don’t, you fail.”
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