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- guardian.co.uk, Friday 18 December 2009 16.30 GMT
Zemarai Bashary, spokesman of the Afghan interior ministry, sits in a large chair in his top-floor meeting room in Kabul and dispenses 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 says, and there can be no doubt that the battle against graft is being won.
Bashary cites two recent, high-profile examples of justice visited upon the venal. One concerns 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 is 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 says. 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 interior minister Mohammad Hanif Atmar, could in theory be investigated. Luckily there is no need for this, he says, because there is no corruption there.
It's probably fair to say this is a minority view. According to the independent anti-corruption watchdog, Integrity Watch Afghanistan, the ministries of interior, justice and public works have been notorious in the past as centres of corruption. It's not just bureaucrats who are on the take. Everyone, from top politicians close to 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 realise is that corruption goes to the heart of what comprises the Afghan "state", said an influential Afghan analyst who asked not to be identified. It was not simply a marginal problem, to be rooted out and eliminated; rather, corruption was an existential issue, he said.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 recognise and unless it is tackled urgently and aggressively, there is no hope of turning things around in Afghanistan. It has cut into foreign aid, undermined the government's legitimacy, enriched the warlords, empowered the insurgents, and generally affected the whole society," the analyst said.
"Karzai is not serious about fighting corruption and anyone who believes he is going to get rid of it is deluding himself … Let me give you an example: if you want to get a job as a small town teacher, you have to bribe the local education department head even if you have a letter of appointment from the minister of education. The minister is too far removed from the provinces and powerless to influence what goes on.
"The government is too weak and ineffective to control and fight corruption. It's a vicious cycle. Corruption has undercut the government's legitimacy and rule of law and the lack of rule of law in turn has undercut the government's ability to fight corruption."
Western leaders, including Gordon Brown, 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.
Western diplomats are pinning their hopes on Karzai's pledge in his inauguration speech last month to prosecute those who spread corruption. "Corruption is a very dangerous enemy of the state," he said. But Lorenzo Delesgues, director of Integrity Watch, said the task was enormous – and that western aid donors needed to put their own houses in order, too.
"The Taliban are seen as corrupt by only 9% of the population while Karzai's government is seen by the majority as the most corrupt in 40 years," Delesgues said. "There is clear evidence of corruption in the public services and ministries but the corruption commission has not taken action despite our urgings. Karzai is not acting to end impunity."
The election fiasco apart, corrupt land grabs, infrastructure project kickbacks, and bribes demanded by the police (which disproportionately impacted poorer people) were particularly damaging to public confidence, he said. But aid donors had to be much more careful how their money was disbursed, too, a point accepted last week by US defence secretary Robert Gates.
It has been estimated that 50 cents in every $1 in foreign aid is lost to corrupt or fraudulent practices; that figure had risen to 90 cents for some USAid programmes, Delesgues said. US accounting was improving and Britain had been more successful than most in keeping track of its cash, he said, by moving it through trust funds.
"This is a key moment for Afghanistan. They [the west] are only just waking up to the problem [of corruption]. 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 – that corruption is one of the main things you must deal with when you make an intervention. If you don't, you fail."
Staff
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