Corruption in Afghanistan – Does the Ghani Government Have a Chance?

Corruption in Afghanistan – Does the Ghani Government Have a Chance?

Michelle Hughes meeting with the Director of Criminal Investigation, Afghan National Police

I had the opportunity last week to speak at a NATO Building Integrity “Expert Consultation.”  NATO planners were trying to figure out the best way to target corruption in the Afghan National Security Forces during the coming year.  Resources will be scarce, access limited, and influence reduced with the security draw down.  So what, if anything, they asked, can be done?

For me, one of the great things about the consultation was that for the most part, the participants were true subject matter experts.  Here were people who had spent years on the ground, struggling to make sense of the Afghan government, the ISAF coalition, and international donor objectives.  Working with all of these very complex elements of the development puzzle, in an ever-shifting framework for cooperation and oversight, was a challenge that each person in the room understood all too well.  The insights and the discussions on what can and must be done in 2015 and beyond were genuinely insightful, and well-informed by experience. 

What struck me within the first hour of the consultation was the sad consensus that there had been a “magical window of opportunity” in Afghanistan from approximately 2009 – 2011, but that the international community had squandered it by focusing on quantity over quality, and short-term outputs over  long-term outcomes.  Accountability and oversight, and building the right capacity to ensure it, simply was not a priority.  We said that it was, but didn't mainstream the concept into our capacity building plans as a condition predicate to assistance; as an essential element of all other training, equipping, and advising we were doing; or as a “testable item” for senior leader performance.  As a result, anti-corruption took a backseat to other, more tangible and easily measured development activities.  The resultant Afghan perception was that corruption didn't matter that much to the international community after all.

So here we are.  Full responsibility for security has passed to a new Afghan government, but the capacity to oversee and control security force performance remains questionable.  International development and economic assistance is greatly reduced, but the Afghan economy is now hostage to entrenched corruption and graft.  Even with political will, the Afghans lack the technical capacity to detect, investigate, and successfully prosecute complex financial crimes and criminal networks.  After 12 years of police and justice sector development, the core competencies simply do not exist on a sufficient scale to even begin to tackle the problem.  Candidly (because I was there), the skills that are now needed were not even meaningful components of our police or prosecution development programs at the height of our assistance.  They were not seen as critical to the fight.

But they are critical to winning the war – the war that the new Ghani-Abdullah government must wage against corruption if it is to have any hope of legitimacy, economic growth, or sustainable security.  Anti-corruption may not have been a development priority before, but it has to become so now if Afghanistan is to survive.  If it isn't, then the Ghani government really doesn't stand a chance.