Is the Afghan Government Serious about Fighting Corruption? Are We?

by Una M. · 2009-11-17 13:43:00 UTC
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Spencer Ackerman asks if I think the Afghan government's imminent crackdown on corruption, announced with much fanfare yesterday, will be serious. I added a question mark to the title of my previous post -The Great Afghan Corruption Crackdown?- precisely because I'm skeptical.

I believe Ershad Ahmadi and Eshaq Aleko are sincere when they say they want to stamp out the kind of official corruption that has undercut every effort to advance peace and development in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban, but they are in for quite a fight if they are. The history of post-2001 Afghanistan is filled with stories of civil servants who tried to do the right thing, and were crushed into the dust by corrupt and vastly more powerful forces within the state, and abandoned by an unreliable and divided international community when they could have steered their country away from today's treacherous waters with a little political support. Just look at the disarmament program. Or the elections. Or the transitional justice plan.

The past eight years are a wasteland of under-resourced and half-hearted reform attempts. As much blame as the Afghan government deserves for not keeping its promises, the international community has broken most of its own. Time and again, we bought, lied and stalled our way out of doing the hard work of actual state-building. Now, we see how dearly that has cost us and the Afghan people. One unnamed US official quoted in the Guardian put it bluntly, "Afghans see us [the International Security Assistance Force] as being the enforcement mechanism for the mafia."

What gives me a little hope for this new anti-corruption push is the strong-worded support the US and NATO are voicing for the plan from the outset. Hillary Clinton has called for a "major crimes tribunal" to prosecute high-level officials for corruption. There's nothing weasel-worded about that statement, which is why my stomach flopped when I read it. I want this to be the real deal. I want this to work.

According to reports in the media today, NATO will be setting up its own anti-corruption task force to work with the new Afghan Interior Ministry anti-corruption unit. NATO anti-corruption officers will conduct independent investigations, and pass intelligence to their Afghan counterparts in the High Office of Oversight & Anti-Corruption in Afghanistan. The FBI and Britain's Serious Organized Crime Agency will also train Afghan anti-corruption agents.

Afghan reformers exist, and they're brave and dedicated, but they are also up against the worst odds. At every turn so far, we have let them down, even as they warned us what lay ahead. That can't happen this time. The hour is far too late and the costs of failure are the highest they've ever been.

[Photo: UN Office on Drugs and Crime. (UNODC)]

Una M.
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