A few months back a UN Human Rights office report on poverty in Afghanistan described a situation where an overwhelming majority of people were living in poverty: a situation which reinforced a strong sense of disillusionment and growing scepticism about the future of the democratisation process. The report identified abuse of power as a key driver of poverty. It described corrupted power structures at all levels of Afghan society and a lack of will on the part of the country’s leaders and international partners to address the long history of abuse.
Now, a leading Washington DC-based think-tank has laid the blame for this corruption-driven poverty squarely on the United States. The report, by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CISS), titled How America corrupted Afghanistan: Time to look in the mirror analyses a situation where the host government needs the corrupt and loyal powerbrokers and where the US government needs the support of a corrupt host government.
In Afghanistan, like in many conflict-ridden African countries, poverty is widespread and corruption rampant. And the dimension, is that of human rights.
So, who’s becoming rich at the expense of the poor? The Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief’s (ACBAR) 2008 study found that since 2001, donors have agreed to provide $25 billion in aid for civil reconstruction and development, but only delivered $15 billion. The startling bit is that approximately $6 billion went back to donor countries through consultants’ fees and profit.
The direction of aid, the UN report says, has also been supply-driven. With international actors driving the planning of the reconstruction and stabilisation efforts, the Interim Administration was only able to play a limited role in the substantive planning processes, and the participation of Afghans, outside official circles, was disregarded. Eight years after Tokyo 2002 Conference, Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world, with worse development indicators than in 2007. One in three Afghans lives in absolute poverty (9 million people, 36 per cent of the population) and cannot meet his or her basic needs. Furthermore, 37 per cent are situated slightly above the poverty line. Thus, two out of three Afghans live an impoverished and undignified life, struggling daily to provide naan-o-chai (bread and tea) for their families.
A key driver of poverty is the abuse of power. Many Afghan power-holders use their influence to drive the public agenda for their own personal or vested interests. This goes beyond the individual to the (extended) family, tribe, political and other affiliations. Influence is used in relation to the law, policy, practice of public officials, or resource allocation.
Provincial Governors are appointed by President Hamid Karzai, without the communities’ involvement in a governance structure which is Kabul-centric and significantly disconnected from the rural poor. These Governors rarely enjoy the support of their constituents; this deepens the gap between decisionmakers and the people. Moreover, the power and authority of local leaders is at the discretion of these un-elected Governors. And food distribution is mostly in the hands of those who are in a position of power. Power corrupts, and poverty increases.
In 2005, Afghanistan ranked 117 out of 159 countries on Transparency International’s Corruption Index. Four years later, Afghanistan was assessed as the second most corrupt country in the world, just ahead of strife-torn Somalia. In 2010, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) reported that Afghans paid $2.5 billion in bribes over the past year. One Afghan out of two had to pay at least one bribe to a public official. This amounted to an average of $158 paid per capita, in a country that has an annual per capita GDP of $425, thus “a crippling tax on people who are already among the world’s poorest.”
Where unequal relations of power are a key feature of the decisionmaking process and the State is, mostly, not beholden to Afghan citizens, says the UN report, the environment is ripe for those in power to advance their own desires. Corruption influences the way decisions are made and defines public institutions’ priorities. As a consequence, social exclusion is sustained because priorities are determined by those with power and not by the marginalised. As the Afghan context shows, corruption is also implicitly encouraged when there is no genuine means for affected individuals to call the government to account or demand transparency.
Surveys by the International Security Assistance Force, Afghanistan (ISAF) and the latest semi-annual report on the war by the US Department of Defence show that the Afghanistan government provides little or no services for ordinary Afghans. It is widely distrusted and has left key services like prompt justice to the Taliban. What these two surveys agree on is that the alienation has grown steadily more serious over the last half decade, allowing insurgents to expand their control and influence. The CISS report warns, “It will be impossible to implement the civil side of our population-centric strategy unless this situation changes.”
So, what is this situation? The Afghan National Army (ANA), the report says, is more free of corruption than the other elements of the Afghanistan government, but many are more interested in money, drugs, and local power than defeating the Taliban. Corruption rules the police – with the exception of some of the Afghan National Civil Order Police (ANCOP).
The US, the UN and nongovernmental organisations have poured money into the country, but there is no way to quantify just how much of this has been wasted, stolen, or diverted. The bulk of the money has gone to military operations, not aid, and there is no meaningful accounting of how the money actually spent affects Afghans or of the nature of the fiscal and accounting practices used by the US or allied forces. The CISS report says, “It is clear that much of this money goes to US contractors who fail to control their own costs and pass money on to foreign and Afghan contractors who are often corrupt.”
The CISS report, authored by former Pentagon official Anthony Cordesman, enumerates several examples of how US exacerbated corruption in Afghanistan:
- The US played a key role in drafting a constitution that put virtually all money given to the government under the control of the President and ministries that had little capacity to govern and had no idea about checks and balances.
- The US stood by as the Afghan civil service fell apart during the year after the US drove out the Taliban. The few elements of government capacity Afghanistan had remaining, left for other jobs or turned to corruption to survive.
- The US focused on Iraq through 2008 and spent more than twice as much on Iraq during this period as on Afghanistan. When it finally reacted to the rise of the insurgency, it put money into fighting the Taliban in the field and not into providing security for the Afghan people until the strategy changed in mid-2009.
- The US never staffed an integrated system for controlling and evaluating contacts and expenditures or established proper audit and reporting procedures.
- The US never fully supported the High Office of Oversight (HOO), which should have been the prime agency in the Afghanistan for fighting corruption. Sources in the country team warn that the lack of genuine assistance remains the same today.
- The bulk of the money actually spent inside Afghanistan went through poorly supervised military contracts and through aid projects where the emphasis was speed, projected starts, and measuring progress in terms of spending rather than results. The US stood by as contracting became a process in which US and foreign contractors poured money into a limited number of Afghan powerbrokers who set up companies that were corrupt and did not perform. The US also failed to properly ensure that the few powerbrokers caught in extreme corruption did not form new corporations. In many cases, they also paid off insurgents to let them operate.
- The US led an effort to create Afghan forces that took years to acquire meaningful resources and left key elements – especially the police – without adequate pay and with no real controls over how money was spent. When the US finally assigned this a far higher priority, it set grossly over-ambitious goals that focus on quantity over quality and have massive shortfalls in US and allied personnel. The US and its allies could not manage the resulting contracting process.
- The Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) development and effectiveness rating system made no attempt to deal with the problem of corruption or make this a major element of measuring force effectiveness until 2010. Working with corrupt officers and officials was tolerated or justified on the grounds of short-term expediency.
- No meaningful effort was made until late 2008 to calculate how pay compared to the pay offered by the Taliban or to ensure that large amounts of pay did not go to ghost forces or get stolen. This, in addition to the bribes by powerbrokers, narcotraffickers, and higher pay from private security forces, systematically corrupted the ANSF.
- The U.S. pushed for fiscal reform and the creation of a modern banking system to replace the traditional Afghan reliance on the hawala system of money changers in an effort to halt the flow of funds to terrorist and extremists, but failed to create effective regulatory structure or consider the almost inevitable risk of influence peddling and speculation – helping in many ways to lead to cases like Kabul Bank and massive outflows of funds to banks in countries like Dubai.
The Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) only last month presented a report US. Reconstruction Efforts in Afghanistan Would Benefit from a Finalized Comprehensive US Anti-Corruption Strategy. It has called for all US reconstruction funds to be channeled through the Afghanistan government. Inefficient and corrupt it might be.
It is in this backdrop that elections will be held this Saturday to elect the 249 members of the lower house, the Wolesi Jirga, in the country's second parliamentary election since the 2001 US-led invasion that overthrew the Taliban. It would be interesting to see how Afghans react in the polls. It would be a success only if it less fraudulent than the one that elected Karzai.
