From the beginning of its 2001 intervention in Afghanistan, the U.S. undermined its efforts by feeding corruption in the country without recognizing the implications, according to a new report by the U.S. Defense Department.
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The U.S. government’s Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction says corruption has fueled grievances against the Afghan government and channeled material support to the insurgency.
U.S. senators questioned State Department officials closely on Thursday about corruption in Afghanistan and said failure to address it could cause them to rethink the billions of dollars the United States spends there each year.
The almost $115 billion dollars appropriated for aid “injected into a small, underdeveloped country, with limited oversight and strong pressures to spend, contributed to the growth of corruption”, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) said in a report released Wednesday.
Share with Us – We’d love to hear eyewitness accounts, the history behind an article, and smart, constructive criticism. In 2009 and 2010, the emerging concern was that poor USA oversight, procurement, and contracting practices were enabling corrupt behavior, it said. The U.S. shifted its focus to fighting corruption, but by then there were “entrenched criminal patronage networks” to contend with – and an incredible amount of money.
The report offers a number of recommendations for implementing a US interagency anticorruption strategy in Afghanistan.
The inspector general found that in fiscal year 2012, the United States spent $19 billion on services for troops in Afghanistan such as transportation, base construction, and translation – almost as much as Afghanistan’s entire gross domestic product of $20.5 billion that year. “What we do know is, the Taliban continue to pose a security threat, corruption remains a source of profound frustration among the population, and the national unity government has struggled to make headway against corruption”, SIGAR says.
USA senators warned the Obama administration on September 15 that failure to address problems with corruption in Afghanistan could lead to a pullback in the embattled country’s $5 billion in yearly aid.
The report quotes former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Ryan Crocker as saying, “The ultimate failure of our efforts.wasn’t an insurgency. It was the weight of endemic corruption”.
Our analysis reveals that corruption substantially undermined the US mission in Afghanistan from the very beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom. Gordon said the report’s recommendations are important, and should serve as a guideline for future operations like Afghanistan.
“Anticorruption efforts should not be seen as subordinate to or mutually exclusive with security or reconstruction”, said John Sopko, Special Inspector General, on Wednesday.
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Mohib also noted that Global Witness, an worldwide anti-corruption organization, recently praised the Afghan government for taking concrete steps towards ending corruption. When U.S. and Afghan officials united to fight corruption, they had “little success”, because there was no “sustained Afghan and U.S political commitment”.
