Afghanistan: Corruption is the subject

I just read a post at the always-interesting site Registan about corruption in the Afghan National Police. It is sordid and depressing. It would be shocking if I hadn’t long ago ceased being surprised by what people do with guns and without supervision. I’ll quote the original article from Al-Aribiyah about what British troops found when they fought their way into Helmand Province.

As the troops advance, they are learning uncomfortable facts about their local allies: villagers say the government's police force was so brutal and corrupt that they welcomed the Taliban as liberators.

"The police would stop people driving on motorcycles, beat them and take their money," said Mohammad Gul, an elder in the village of Pankela, which British troops have been securing for the past three days after flying in by helicopter.

He pointed to two compounds of neighbors where pre-teen children had been abducted by police to be used for the local practice of "bachabazi," or sex with pre-pubescent boys.

"If the boys were out in the fields, the police would come and rape them," he said. "You can go to any police base and you will see these boys. They hold them until they are finished with them and then let the child go."

The Interior Ministry in Kabul said it would contact police commanders in the area before responding in detail.

When the Taliban arrived in the village 10 months ago and drove the police out, local people rejoiced, said Mohammad Rasul, a toothless elderly farmer who keeps a few cows and chickens in a neatly tended orchard of pomegranate trees, figs and grape vines.


Although his own son was killed by a Taliban roadside bomb five years ago, Rasul said the Taliban earned their welcome in the village by treating people with respect.

So, we have the ANP shaking people down like the local branch of the Mafia, and then engaging in brutal sexual abuse. Note that the farmer lost his son to the Taliban and yet prefers them to the ANP.

This is history repeating itself. Why, one might ask, were the Taliban able to take over and hold Afghanistan against all the other warlords? Were they better fighters? Were they better equipped? Better generaled? Nope.

They were honest. Damn them for a bunch of medieval, superstitious, woman-hating sadists, but they were, and are, a very legalistic bunch. Sharia law is a throwback to centuries ago, but it is law, and they rule by it.

After the Soviets were driven out Afghanistan had a not-very-charming civil war among the various warlord factions. From that time until the Taliban took over in 1996, a regular Afghan civilian could expect to be stopped on the road and robbed at gunpoint every few miles by the local militiamen. Businesses paid protection money. It was essentially a country ruled by organized crime, only less organized than Chicago in the 1920’s.

The Taliban, backed by factions within the Pakistani government, made headway in their successful fight for power by simply leaving people alone. If you grew your beard, kept your radio quiet and your women under wraps, you could go about your business in relative safety. Anybody who stole lost a hand, and unlike the previous non-administration, bribes and connections didn’t do the crook any good. Overall the Taliban were bureaucratic sticklers for procedure. It says something about the abysmal level that things had gotten to that Afghans preferred living in the legal equivalent of Europe in the year 1214. It says something about the failure of our efforts today that many still prefer it.

Corruption in Afghanistan is endemic partly because of the general chaos, partly because of our influence (more on that later) and partly because the country is tribal. Tribal societies work on the basis of familial and personal relationships, patronage, and nepotism. Afghanistan seems to have the worst of all worlds – the tradition of favoring relatives and rewarding followers without the original firm social structure that made it work. Endless war, the imposition of alien political structures, and huge flows of foreign cash have broken down the traditional safeguards. I’m not saying that Afghanistan ever had a golden age of lawfulness, just a set of traditions that were coherent enough to organize a society. The key to power in Afghanistan is eliminating corruption, or at least minimizing and regulating it.

How do we eliminate corruption in a country where loyalty is rented?

We could start by not underestimating the Afghans. The primary Afghan values are hospitality and practicality. They may not have progressive values about the role of women but they know how to adapt and survive. I have read accounts of local Afghan judges setting up mock “fair trials” for visiting UN representatives to show how well the reform efforts are going. Then, with the foreigners out of the way, the Potemkin courts get shut down and it is back to bribery and favoritism. They will get away with whatever we let them.

We could also start by cleaning up our own act. Our whole semi-privatized effort over there is riddled with corruption. Contractors are doling out bribes and protection money, which sustains and reinforces the present way of doing things.


Ultimately, we have to be willing to step away from our allies. Afghanistan has held greater importance in the minds of western governments than it really deserves. Great Britain and Russia played “The Great Game” of influence and espionage for decades in Central Asia, to no real advantage for either. We went in, ostensibly after Osama bin Laden, when with a bit more pressure we could have had him for a few diplomatic concessions. Now he is almost certainly in the tribal areas of Pakistan, so there goes that reasoning. Some see our interest in Afghanistan as relating to a non-Russian pipeline route for oil and gas out of the ‘stans. That is one pipeline that won’t get built for a while. The whole deal is such a loser that we could safely threaten Hamid Karzai and the whole wretched crew with abandonment if they don’t clean up their acts. That includes prosecuting the rapist policemen.

The two valuable things that we could offer the people of Afghanistan would be personal security and some kind of consistent justice. Until they see western presence as a source for these things they will find it in the religious fanaticism of the Taliban.