Given the record of Goldman Sachs (as detailed in McClatchy's five-part series), AIG, Halliburton and other supposedly upright U.S. corporations, it's a tad arrogant to complain about the corruption of other countries. Endemic or not, the wink-wink, nod-nod deals of much of the Third World amount to peanuts when compared with the rip-offs visited on taxpayers, investors and consumers here at home. So, while the U.S. ranks 19th on the Transparency Index's corruption scale, and Afghanistan ranks 179th, one step off the bottom, there's a little more to the picture than can be addressed by such metrics.
Be that as it may, corruption is viewed as one of the key obstacles in dealing with the resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan. That corruption, as the "leaked cables" sent to the White House by U.S. Ambassador to Kabul Karl Eikenberry pointed out, may make the sending of more troops foolish if President Karzai, newly sworn in after a tainted election, cannot be made to root it out. As Tom Engelhardt explains, however, rooting it out is like asking Karzai either to commit suicide or "drink the sea":
Can there be any question that there is a plethora of corrupt officials to arrest? The president's brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, reportedly on the CIA payroll, is also, as it's politely put in the press, a "suspected player in the country's booming illegal opium trade." Ahmad Rateb Popal, the president's cousin and another figure long linked to the drug trade, runs a local security company protecting American supply convoys that, according to Aram Roston of the Nation magazine, is involved in an industry-wide protection scam, using American Army money to pay off the Taliban not to attack. In addition, American arms and ammunition are clearly ending up in Taliban hands. The recent presidential election was a spectacle of fraud; the Afghan Army, despite years of training, may hardly exist (as Ann Jones reported for this site in September); the ill-paid, ill-trained Afghan police are known to operate on the principle of corruption; and a surprisingly small percentage of foreign reconstruction funds actually makes it out of the pockets of big private contractors and western specialists, as well as security firms, and into Afghan hands.
And then, of course, there's Kabul's "Obama market." (In the period when the Soviets ruled Kabul, it was the "Brezhnev market" in honor of the Russian leader, and decades later the "Bush market.") This "notorious bazaar" is "full of chow and supplies bought or stolen from the vast U.S. military bases," according to Jay Price of the McClatchy newspapers, who calls the name "a modest counterweight to [Obama's] Nobel Peace Prize." His description includes the following: "One shop offered an expensive military-issue sleeping bag, tactical goggles like those used by U.S. troops and a stack of plastic footlockers, including one stenciled 'Campbell G Co. 10th Mtn Div.' Another had a sophisticated 'red-dot' optical rifle sight of a kind often used by soldiers and contractors."
In other words, from the American, European, and Japanese reconstruction boondoggle to the presidential palace, from the U.S. and Afghan military to street-level, the country is a klepto-state. ...
It's like asking him -- to mix metaphors -- either to put a gun to his head or drink the sea. Consider it a measure of Afghan realities today that you can hardly read a piece about the country in the Western press without the word "corruption" lurking somewhere in it, and yet the reporting on how that system of corruption actually works has generally been thin indeed.
Engelhardt fills in some of the gaps for us with Pratap Chatterjee's Paying Off the Warlords: Anatomy of an Afghan Culture of Corruption. Chatterjee, with long experience as an investigative journalist, shows how deeply entrenched that corruption really is, and how far up the ladder it goes - in this case all the way to the new first vice president, the notorious warlord and war criminal, Mohammed Qasim Fahim.
The view of General Stanley McChrystal adviser David Kilcullen is that a decade of U.S. military occupation in Afghanistan is needed for victory. If turning things around requires honest government in Kabul, that estimate seems hopelessly optimistic.