When Afghan President Hamid Karzai was sworn in for a new term, he made a pledge to crack down on corruption.
Promises, promises. Was Karzai telling foreign leaders what they wanted to hear, or is the country doomed to remain at the bottom of the transparency index?
According to Amb. Karl Eikenberry, the top U.S. diplomat in Afghanistan, the Afghan government is in fact taking the first steps to crack down on official corruption. Eikenberry is appearing on Capitol Hill today with Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, and in his prepared testimony, he noted that the National Directorate of Security -- Afghanistan's domestic intel agency -- has created a "major case" unit responsible for investigating major corruption.
"With the support of the FBI, the DEA [Drug Enforcement Agency], and our military, the Ministries of Interior and Counter Narcotics, and the Afghan National Directorate of Security recently created the Major Crimes Task Force, which is responsible for investigating major corruption, kidnapping, and organized crimes cases," he said. "Similarly, Afghanistan's Attorney General recently established a special Anti-Corruption Unit, aimed at prosecuting misconduct by mid- and high-level government officials."
What's more, the Afghan government has established a new Anti-Corruption Tribunal to try corruption cases involving senior officials. Karzai has also pushed to expand the powers of the High Office of Oversight, a sort of government inspectorate.
So have their been any results so far with the new anti-corruption push? Yesterday, an Afghan court convicted Mir Abdul Ahad Sahebi, the mayor of Kabul, of fraud and sentenced him to four years (Sahebi, however, was not in court, and he recently told Ben Arnoldy of the *Christian Science Monitor *the charges against him were overblown). It was the first high-profile conviction of an Afghan official since Karzai promised to launch the crackdown.
Some of the responsibility for reducing corruption, however, rests with the U.S.-led coalition. The military is spending millions of dollars through local contractors, and quite often those contracts go to sophisticated, well connected firms. It may be perfectly legal, and expedient, but it fuels Afghan suspicions that the contracting game is rigged in favor of the country's elite.
[PHOTO: Wikimedia]
ALSO:
