Afghanistan: the world's second most corrupt nation

Paul Woodward, Online Correspondent

• Last Updated: November 18. 2009 9:56AM UAE / November 18. 2009 5:56AM GMT

As President Hamid Karzai is about to be inaugurated for his second five-year term, the country he leads now ranks globally ahead of only one other - Somalia - in the perceived level of public-sector corruption.

Transparency International, whose annually published index has become a benchmark of perceptions of a country's corruption, in its 2005 report ranked Afghanistan as 117th, ahead of 33 other even more corrupt nations. That was an assessment made during Hamid Karzai's first year in office as president. By the end of his first term and after an election judged to have involved massive fraud in Mr Karzai's favour, Afghanistan now ranks in its level of corruption as less than just one other country, Somalia, a country that has not had a functioning government for over two decades.

"Just how far Hamid Karzai's reputation has fallen is summed up by a cartoon in The Economist, which shows the newly re-elected Afghan leader seated at a table - between Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Robert Mugabe," Peter Graff wrote.

"The Afghan president, to be inaugurated for a second term at a Kabul ceremony on November 19, may not quite yet be as much of a pariah in the West as the leaders of Iran and Zimbabwe.

"But that such a comparison seems apt at all is a sign of just how thoroughly his image has been trashed by a fraud-tainted vote, placing in doubt the future of the Western military commitment to shield his government from the Taliban."

Mr Karzai's inauguration speech has become a crucial test of continued international support for his government, said James Blitz in The Financial Times.

"Senior US and Nato officials say the speech, which is likely to be attended by a wide array of foreign ministers, must make a significant commitment to political reform. 'It does not matter how much money we foreigners put into this place and it does not matter how many troops we pour into this place,' ambassador Joseph Mussomeli, assistant chief of mission at the US embassy in Kabul, told the FT. 'If the government of Afghanistan does not take charge of its responsibilities and fight corruption then things will go very wrong.'

"In Brussels, Ivo Daalder, US ambassador to Nato, struck a similar note: 'Part of Karzai's credibility will rest on what he promises to deliver to his people. It needs to be followed by deeds, he needs to set out a programme that he will then implement.'"

Reuters reported: "Afghanistan will form a high-level anti-corruption unit to investigate graft among senior officials, the Interior Ministry said on Monday, after widespread criticism and demands from Washington for the government to do more.

" 'President Hamid Karzai, after being re-elected for another five years, has dedicated his five years to fighting corruption,' Interior Minister Hanif Atmar told a news conference.

"Attention has focused on the legitimacy of Karzai's new government after a fraud-marred election, with US President Barack Obama deciding on a new strategy for Afghanistan that might include sending up to 40,000 more troops.

"Atmar was flanked by US ambassador Karl Eikenberry and British ambassador Mark Sedwill as he made the announcement."

Later in the news conference Mr Eikenberry expressed his own scepticism: "Words are cheap. Deeds are required," he said.

Reporting from Herat in western Afghanistn, Reuters said: "By clamping down on bribery, firing corrupt employees and privatising bloated state enterprises, Afghan Commerce Minister Wahidullah Shahrani hopes to slowly lift the cloud of corruption from Afghanistan...

"While the West has been complaining loudly about what Karzai must do to tackle graft, Shahrani says he has been methodically spring-cleaning his ministry since taking office nine months ago.

"By introducing privatisation strategies, measures to streamline bureaucratic business processes and liquidating or privatising state enterprises, corruption will fall and business in Afghanistan will prosper, Shahrani said."

The Guardian reported on Sunday: "Western soldiers are to begin investigating high-profile Afghans suspected of involvement in what one American official describes as a 'criminal mafia state' in a sign of the growing international exasperation with Hamid Karzai's failure to crack down on corruption.

"A taskforce being established by Nato in Kabul will consist of a small team of anti-corruption officers, as well as a criminal investigator and prosecutor who hope senior generals will be able to stop cases being derailed by opposition from the Afghan government.

"Details of the body emerged as the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, said Washington had called on Karzai to create a 'major crimes tribunal' and an anti-corruption commission.

" 'Now that the election is finally over, we're looking to see tangible evidence that the government, led by the president but going all the way down to the local level, will be more responsive to the needs of the people,' Clinton said today.

"Her comments reflect growing impatience among Karzai's western backers at his apparent unwillingness to tackle corruption. Earlier this month, Gordon Brown warned the Afghan president that he would lose international support if he failed to improve its performance."

Writing in Prospect Magazine, Alex de Waal from Britain's Social Science Research Council, said: "When Nato concedes a draw in Afghanistan, it will be because of its failure to understand the country's politics. But a deeper failure will lurk in the background. In the past decade the west has launched a huge experiment to build capable states in the world's most difficult countries. Troops, technical advisers and aid budgets are the tools of choice. The experiment is said to have worked in East Timor, Kosovo and Sierra Leone; now Afghanistan, Congo and Sudan are top of the target list. All are failed or fragile states where patronage is paramount and where the political arena is a marketplace, not a debating chamber.

"The problem is that Nato and the UN are terribly bad at patronage politics. Their operations are run from green-zone ghettoes and their representatives are risk averse, obsessed with procedures and rarely interacting with their hosts. No one in Afghanistan gets promoted for bending the rules to fit the reality of patron-client relations and the exchange of favours.

"How did we get here? According to the conventional story, countries like Afghanistan are in trouble because they can't sustain order, manage a budget, or deliver services. So we provide funds to kick-start development, charities to provide services, experts to run departments, and troops to enforce the law. A helpful cocoon emerges in which the state grows stronger. And when this state looks enough like the Czech Republic, we hand over the keys.

"In 2005, the UN set up a peacebuilding commission to promote such technocratic state-building, which is especially fashionable in western aid departments. The state-builders normally show up after the peace agreements have been signed, give themselves four to six years to get results, and hold multi-party elections or a referendum on self-determination as a graduation ceremony. At the start it looks feasible and western governments, aware of their treasuries and fickle publics, rarely admit that the process might be much slower.

"Yet even in tiny countries such hopes are fatally optimistic."

pwoodward@thenational.ae