Corruption eats away at Afghan government

Among the soldiers, diplomats and aid workers who live in Afghanistan, it is the problem that nobody dares mention. Among ordinary Afghans, it's a daily presence, the corruption that is rooted deeply in the Western-backed Afghan government and its appointed officials. When Afghans are forced by uniformed men to pay large sums of cash in order to travel safely on provincial roads, as they are daily, when their colleagues are arrested and beaten in exchange for ransom payments, when they learn that people pay $150,000 for the job of district police chief in parts of Kandahar province, when entire aid shipments or thousands of police salaries are seized for private use, when world-record heroin exports take place under police watch, everyone in Afghanistan knows where to look. On heavily guarded streets on the edge of every Afghan city and in the centre of Kabul are the large, wedding-cake houses, surrounded by walls and guards and filled with luxury goods, built in a style popularly known as "narcotecture." Inside live the senior officials with top roles in Afghanistan's government, some of whom have amassed fortunes of hundreds of millions of dollars. Some are governors of provinces, like Kandahar governor Asadullah Khalid, reported by Canadian diplomats to have committed torture. Some are top cabinet ministers. Others wield power through family ties to the president. The man considered by many observers to be the most powerful and feared figure in the Afghan south is not the Kandahar governor but rather Ahmed Wali Karzai, appointed by his brother, President Hamid Karzai, to represent Kandahar province in Kabul. A US government document leaked to ABC News two years ago accused him of being the central figure in the region's vast opium-export market, which produces the majority of the world's opium and heroin. This week, senior US and British officials said in interviews that they believe he enables, and likely profits from, opium shipments across southern Afghanistan to Iran, and prevents opium crops of those who support him from being eradicated. He has repeatedly denied such accusations. Huge fortunes are being earned by many of these officials, Western sources said. It is customary to charge a 20 percent commission on imports or exports brought through their provinces, including opium exports valued at more than $800-million. That means hundreds of millions can be earned each year in a country where many families live on less than a dollar a day. And there are other avenues for corruption. Last fall, US military officials discovered that in one region of eastern Afghanistan only a third of the 3,300 police officers supposedly serving in the region actually existed; the salaries from the 2,100 "ghost officers" were going straight into the pockets of politicians and senior police figures. This practice is thought to be commonplace across Afghanistan, with as many as 60 to 80 percent of officers in some districts being "ghosts." Indeed, Western-funded programs designed to end corruption can have the opposite effect. British officials said that the governor of Kandahar has used poppy-eradication funds, designed to eliminate the opium-poppy crops of wealthy traffickers at the top of the drug economy, to target his political enemies, usually people who are not on the list for eradication. "There's a lot of belief among Afghans that when [the West] turns off the taps, it's going to go back to 1989, so these warlords are building war chests, big piles of money for guns, tanks, whatever," a British official said. Getting to the bottom of the corruption in Afghanistan is nearly impossible. The country does not have conspiracy or racketeering laws, which would allow prosecutors to investigate them. Nor does it have more than a rudimentary banking system, so that ill-gotten funds are difficult to find. US officials said, however, that some moves are being made in this direction, and some senior officials may soon be placed on no-fly lists. Western officials are becoming increasingly frustrated with the power of such well-connected strongmen as larger areas of Afghanistan fall under Taliban control and the millions in Western spending produces few signs of a sustainable economy. In March, after years of international pressure, Karzai ousted Asadullah Wafa from his job as governor of Helmand province amid allegations that he had profited from that province's enormous opium exports and enabled large-scale organized crime. Wafa had expelled two British officials from the province after they had launched a program to get Taliban leaders to surrender. After being fired, Wafa was promptly appointed last month to a new position: head of the complaints department in the national-security branch of Karzai's office. Indeed, the current pressure by Canadian and other officials to remove the Kandahar governor from office seems almost identical to a similar campaign, begun five years ago, to get his predecessor, the former mujahedeen fighter Gul Agha Sherzai, removed from the same office. Sherzai had admitted to receiving $1 million a week from his share of import duties and from the opium trade, and was considered violent and dangerous. He was immediately made governor of US-led Nangarhar province in the east. Indeed, many of the current corruption problems date back to the early months of the Afghan war, in 2001, when US Army Special Forces and CIA agents gave millions of dollars to regional fighters such as Sherzai to battle the Taliban, and then, after the Taliban had been ousted, allowed them to become the de facto government. They displaced both the traditional system of tribal elders and the emerging national government. Karzai relied on them to extend his influence beyond his family's own tribe.