Afghanistan and Corruption
Dec 7th, 2009 • Posted in: Commentaryby Rushworth M. Kidder
Suppose you were the devil, and you were determined to thwart president Barack Obama’s newly announced strategy for Afghanistan. What would you do? Build up the Taliban? Wear down U.S. forces? Provoke protests in Washington? Destabilize Pakistan? Send in droughts, plagues, and earthquakes?
These would all help. But if I were the devil, I’d want an overarching plan, elegantly simple but devastatingly effective, that could undermine every effort the president could make. For that, I’d turn to the perfect poison: public and private corruption.
Like the fabled universal solvent of the alchemists, corruption knows no limits. It dissolves every aspect of a nation’s life. When you unleash fraud, bribery, extortion, and cheating — when every decision can be bought, every fund embezzled, every census padded, every election stolen — then no institution, structure, or motivation is free from the frenetic immorality of putting self above community. Want to maintain a strong army? Fine, until someone pads the regimental rosters with names of the dead in order to pocket their wages. Want to fund a school or hospital? Fine, until contributors realize that their money is being skimmed off before it reaches its target. Want to prepare an audit for a donor nation? Fine, until it becomes obvious that most of the numbers in the report have been made up.
In Afghanistan, it seems, corruption is having a heyday. The 2009 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), produced by the global nonprofit Transparency International, appeared just weeks before President Obama’s West Point speech last week on Afghanistan. That index ranked 180 countries according to their levels of perceived corruption. Afghanistan sat at 179, displaced only by Somalia as the most corrupt nation on earth.
You wouldn’t know that, however, from the president’s speech. True, he promised to “support Afghan ministries, governors, and local leaders that combat corruption.” He also said he would “expect those who are ineffective or corrupt to be held accountable.” But many of those officials owe their position to Afghan president Hamid Karzai, whose reelection may have been one of the most blatant thefts in the history of election monitoring. Describing the Karzai government as “legitimate,” Obama noted only (and almost parenthetically) that it was “marred by fraud.” Beyond that, corruption received little mention — as though it were merely an annoying nuisance, like mosquitoes or potholes, that you must simply put up with.
Now, that might be an adequate response if Afghanistan were only ordinarily corrupt, like Saudi Arabia (ranked at 63), China (79), or Mexico (89). But Afghanistan wallows in industrial-strength, weapons-grade corruption. If the country really is that deep in the mire, what’s the probability that anything the United States does will be effective? What’s more, if the Afghan government’s own accounting is fraudulent, how will we even know where our dollars actually went?
To his credit, Obama is proposing, along with the military surge, a “civilian surge that reinforces positive action” in Afghanistan. That effort, to be successful, will need to focus first on fighting corruption. How? In releasing the CPI report, Huguette Labelle, chair of Transparency International, set out her own formula. “Stemming corruption,” she noted, “requires strong oversight by parliaments, a well-performing judiciary, independent and properly resourced audit and anticorruption agencies, vigorous law enforcement, transparency in public budgets, revenue and aid flows, as well as space for independent media and a vibrant civil society.” Each of these items is essential, and each will take funds, time, energy, and moral clarity. Without those things, there will be no real reform, just a long pause. The ringleaders of corruption, having an enormous vested interest in preserving the current system, will simply hunker down until the troop pullout.
With a “civilian surge” effort, however, Obama has a chance to reset the course of history. As he told the West Point cadets last week, the world has changed. “Unlike the great power conflicts and clear lines of division that defined the twentieth century,” he said, “our effort will involve disorderly regions, failed states, diffuse enemies.” Those are exactly the circumstances that, according to the CPI report, breed corruption. “Countries which are perceived as the most corrupt,” the report notes, “are also those plagued by long-standing conflicts, which have torn apart their governance infrastructure.”
As the global economy becomes more interlocked, great-power conflicts may lie largely behind us. From now on, warfare will occur largely within failed states. That will require our civil-society organizations to battle corruption just as skillfully as our military forces battle insurgents — lest the entire resources meant for warfare get siphoned off into Swiss bank accounts held by people far more clever at fraud than we are. Afghanistan is handing us the opportunity to develop effective anticorruption strategies, which could so change the face of twenty-first-century warfare that world peace actually might be within reach. Devilishly hard to do, perhaps, but nothing less will be successful.
©2009 Institute for Global Ethics
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Working in Iraq has taught me a lot regarding corruption and the costs thereof. The results of corruption are not just seen in loss of money and confidence, but in security as well.
Case in point: a truck full of explosives rolls through not just one but three Iraqi checkpoints before being detected by American bomb sniffing dogs. When you live in a country where one hundred US dollars will feed your 18 member family for a month, a $100 bill will solve a lot of administrative difficulties.
And Iraq was once a fairly modern, vibrant society.
But Afghanistan has never really been so. I was talking to an American Military security trainer two days ago and he was bemoaning the fact that our best friend in Tikrit had just been killed. This was a man who ran a mafia-like organization. He would boast that he had personally organized the killing of over five hundred insurgents. They were so afraid of him that they had almost all left the area. “Now what do we do to keep the “bad guys” out?” whines the trainer. We have to reluctantly deal with and pay such people just to stay ahead of this awful game.
When Afghanistan has been administered by such warlords for hundreds and thousands of years we are certainly not going to solve the problem in two or three or ten. Or with ten or twenty or a hundred thousand military.
Rush’s comments are absolutely right on the money (grimace).
One of the best things we are doing in Iraq and what we should begin to do in Aghanistan is to train the Judiciary in evidence-based justice. As things stand, Judges, lawyers and prosecutors base their cases only on witness statements. This, of course, follows both Old Testament and Q’ranic law.
Evidence based investigations provide subjective data, but, more importantly, provide a screen for the Judges and the whole legal system.
The Judge can convict (and stay alive) when he can say, “But the evidence shows … “.
Rush is right. The best thing we can do in this century is to develop the ethical rock on which to build a whole new society. Not just in the failed states, but in our own lives and cultures.
Let me add one more point.
Lack of corruption is not the only measure of civilization. The most corruption free time in the history of Afghanistan was when the Taliban were in charge. They punished corruption severely whenever they found it.
But none of us would want to live under such tyranny.
As long as Afghanistan retains its cash crop, corruption will prevail as it has for centuries.
Re Rush’s late-artcle comment regarding upcoming changes in world warfare: A worthwhile commentary on the subject can be found in Victor Davis Hanson’s exerpted lecture “The Future of Western War”, Imprimis, Nov 2009, which can be viewed at the Hillsdale College website, Hillsdale.edu.
Rush hits the bullseye again. Why is this story not more broadly, insistently, persistently reported?
Perhaps because we (as a nation, even as a coalition) *want* corruption to go away, but are unwilling the pay the full price Rush enumerates. Partly too through ignorance. An Afghan free press must be part of the solution price too.