Think Progress

by Faiz Shakir, Amanda Terkel, Matt Corley, Benjamin Armbruster, and Zaid Jilani

The Reign Of Corruption

As President Obama prepares to make his decision about sending more troops to Afghanistan, U.S. policy in that country is being hotly debated. One of the issues most salient to the debate and to Afghan citizens is that of corruption within the government, which has become so severe that some Afghan officials now believe that 75 percent of all government revenues are "wasted due to administrative corruption." State Department employee and former Marine Matthew Hoh, who resigned over his opposition to the war, cited "glaring corruption and unabashed graft" and a "president whose confidants and chief advisers comprise drug lords" as reasons for why he felt the Afghan government was untenable. Amb. Richard Holbrooke responded to Hoh's views by telling the press, "I agreed with much of his analysis." "If...we are perceived as backing thugs, then we are just undermining ourselves," noted Maj. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the senior military intelligence official in the country. Earlier this month, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) came out against sending more troops to the central Asian country, instead opting for accelerating the training of the Afghan National Security Forces while strengthening Afghan institutions and combating corruption. During an interview with MSNBC yesterday, Levin said that the people of Afghanistan "have got to have confidence in the government of Afghanistan, that they're going to deliver services and be noncorrupt." Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) reiterated this point, saying that there is a "corruption problem" in the Afghan government. In a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry (D-MA) said the international community must address the problems "caused by corrupt officials at every level of [the Afghan] government." Indeed, electoral corruption and the proliferation of the illegal drug trade are both problems any Afghan government will have to tackle if it seeks credibility. As Hedayat Amin Arsala, the Afghan Minister for Commerce and Industry, has stated, "Unless we are able to clean this country from corruption, we won't be able to make much progress. And that's damaging to the government, to the people of Afghanistan. It undermines our stability."

DRUG LORDS AND WAR LORDS: Perhaps the most important contributing factor to Afghan corruption has been the drug trade. It is estimated that Afghanistan is now responsible for supplying over 93 percent of the global opiate market. Some estimates say that opium production even accounts for up to 97 percent of the country's per-capita annual GDP. "This a source of income for the warlords and regional factions to pay their soldiers," former Afghan Interior Minister Ali Ahmad Jalili told Reuters in 2005. While reports vary on how dependent the insurgency's annual revenue is on the illicit drug trade (estimates range from $70 million to $400 million per year), there is little doubt that they "are funding their operations through illicit drug trade, so they are all interlinked." Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Brian Katulis reports the drug trade is one of the major factors that "fuels" the various insurgent groups. As former British ambassador for Uzbekistan Craig Murray has noted, many of the warlords that the U.S. has allied itself with in Afghanistan are active in the drug trade. One of the most notorious of these is alleged to be Abdul Wali Karzai, President Hamid Karzai's brother. Abdul Wali Karzai is purportedly "the biggest drug baron of Afghanistan." Although American officials have long denied that Karzai's brother is involved in drug trafficking, the recent revelation that the CIA -- which has been gathering intelligence about narcotics trafficking in Afghanistan -- has been paying him for years prompted Kerry to demand "untainted" investigations into the "alleged entanglements." The U.S. policy until recently had been to focus on eradicating poppy cultivation, which "proved ineffective" as 2007 and 2008 poppy cultivation reached levels "unprecedented in the history of the modern drug trade." American policy is now shifting towards "emphasizing rural development and interdiction of drug traffickers."

ELECTORAL CORRUPTION: Following a "marred" election fraught with electoral irregularities last month, a political crisis ignited that has deeply undermined trust in the Afghan governing institutions by the Afghan people. After several months of deliberation by the Afghan government and the international forces, President Karzai finally agreed to a runoff election between himself and chief rival Abdullah Abdullah which is set to take place on Nov. 7. "The important thing is for us is that the election should be fair, and fraud should be prevented," said Sayed Fazzel Sancharaki, a spokesman for Abdullah's campaign. Concerns abound that the runoff will take place under the same high level of corruption as the previous election. "I do not think that you can expect any great new thunderbolts of just and fair elections because we still have the same machinery in place that has not been fixed at all," notes International Crisis Group (ICG) senior analyst Candace Rondeaux. "In order to really correct the flaws in this process you need a major overhaul. ... The leadership of this [Afghan electoral] body has been so abysmal that it does not make sense to think that you would get different results by having the same people review ballots again." ICG also notes that the fraudulent first round has been a "boon" for recruitment for the insurgency. Without proper elections, the chances of producing a government that can win the trust of its people are dim. Unfortunately, even if the runoff proceeds without the massive fraud that took place in the previous election, Afghanistan still has a long way to go in fighting what Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid calls its "culture of corruption." As Defense Secretary Robert Gates notes, "We need to be realistic that the issues of corruption and governance that we are trying to work with the Afghan government on are not going to be solved simply on the outcome of the presidential election." 

CORRUPTION IN GOVERNANCE: A new CAP article notes that "ex-warlords continue to hold back democratic governance." CAP experts Caroline Wadhams, Colin Cookman, and Christina Misunas examine corruption in the Afghan state and note the dangers of overlooking ties to corrupt officials and violators of human rights in favor of seeking short-term alliances. They note that the "Karzai government and international community's inability or unwillingness to empower a justice sector capable of prosecuting the powerful, curbing abuses of authority, and instituting a process of transitional justice, truth, and reconciliation for past crimes serves as a principle source of support for the insurgency." A 2006 survey by Integrity Watch Afghanistan "found that nearly 60 percent of respondents considered the post-2001 period the most corrupt period in the country in the past 50 years, compared to only 9 percent who said corruption was highest during the period of Taliban rule." The report says that the "continued presence and empowerment of [warlords] has serious risks to long-term stability in Afghanistan. Local warlords can exploit American backing to selectively target rivals as well as terrorists, and their continued presence in government roles delegitimizes the Afghan government and open space for the insurgency." The CAP scholars conclude that "continued acquiescence to abuses carries a cost for the country's future stability. They may offer short-term tactical assistance against local rivals or international terrorists in return for American support, but the sustainability of perpetuating relationships with warlords in the face of an insurgency that feeds them is far from guaranteed." Earlier this year, CAP released "Sustainable Security in Afghanistan." The report argued that the United States must pressure the president of Afghanistan to utilize the Afghanistan Advisory Board on Senior Appointments to remove the most corrupt leaders and select qualified, honest officials. Additionally, the United States should seek to strengthen the Afghan General Independent Administration for Anti-Corruption. 

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"The revolving door of radicals coming into the Obama administration continues to spin. Now, the latest Obama nominee to draw fire is Judge Edward Chen. ... Judge Chen should not be confirmed by the U.S. Senate."
-- Fox News' Sean Hannity, 10/27/09, arguing that Chen's personal views disqualify him from the bench

VERSUS

"The reason that the Senate has advice and consent and it doesn't include an ideological litmus test is because the nominees' personal opinions are irrelevant, as they're supposed to set those aside and rule as a matter of law."
-- Hannity, 6/28/01