The Department of Justice dialed back anti-corruption assistance it was providing to the government in Afghanistan after Kabul “blocked” efforts to advance prosecutions.
The Obama administration decided on the move in 2010, according to an inspector general’s report published Thursday, after Afghan officials under then-President Hamid Karzai intervened “in specific cases.” The DOJ anti-corruption unit had only been established in August 2009.
The Karzai administration’s meddling, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) report noted, included “securing the release of a high-level Afghan official arrested for corruption.”
“The Administration subsequently reduced the authority” of its anti-corruption task force, the report then noted, which had only been formed in August 2009. “DOJ significantly limited its involvement in the Anticorruption Unit.”
SIGAR reported that the Justice Department still “conducts some activities” with the public integrity initiative, citing assistance it provides in the “specialized training of Afghan prosecutors.”
The end of the Karzai administration in Kabul and the start of Ashraf Ghani’s presidency last year did give one “senior” Justice Department official hope that there will be “a new era in political will to fight corruption” in Afghanistan. SIGAR noted, however, that DOJ reported “no improvement in the Afghan government’s willingness to prosecute major corruption cases in 2014.”
Outside of the president’s office, the investigation cited Afghanistan’s Attorney General as being a hindrance “for several years” to fighting systemic graft. The office of Mohammed Ishaq Aloko, Afghanistan’s lead prosecutor since 2008, has “declined offers from DOJ to train Afghan prosecutors in the Anticorruption Unit on investigative methods for pursuing corruption cases.”
SIGAR’s report–which focused the inability of the US to properly account for the results of $1 billion in “rule of law” capacity building in Afghanistan–also blasted American officials for tolerating crooked officials.
“Multiple officials and experts told us this is primarily because senior US government officials have prioritized stability and security over fighting corruption,” the report noted. “For example, although the US Embassy drafted a comprehensive anticorruption strategy in 2010,” SIGAR added, “it was never approved, and senior US officials decided not to implement the strategy’s initiatives.”
The report added that experts had told SIGAR that “they believe senior US officials have knowingly accepted ongoing corruption in the Afghan government for the sake of maintaining government stability and security.”
However, as Harper’s Scott Horton noted in 2010, when detailing the Justice Department’s involvement in anti-corruption efforts in Afghanistan, the US role in eroding public integrity in post-Taliban Afghanistan hasn’t been just passive.
“In the early years of the Afghanistan conflict, the United States was generous with ‘walking around money,’ making payments to buy the support of local leaders as needed,” Horton wrote. “It also appears to have found a number of soft exceptions to its contracting guidelines.”
Whether US anti-corruption efforts are, in the end, having a net-positive effect, however, is impossible to discern.
“We recognize the difficulties and barriers to achieving ideal or perfect program performance measurement in Afghanistan where security, mobility, illiteracy and other challenges persist,” SIGAR noted. “Nevertheless, spending over $1 billion dollars without having a credible level of planning and measuring for results leaves the US uninformed on what its investments are accomplishing in developing the rule of law in Afghanistan.”
Read the full SIGAR report here.
