| | Envoy Says Corruption Helps Taliban Win Recruits The New York Times
07/29/2010
By Mark Landler
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WASHINGTON — Rampant corruption in Afghanistan provides the Taliban with their No. 1 recruiting tool, the Obama administration’s special representative to the region, Richard C. Holbrooke, said Wednesday. But he insisted that the United States was taking adequate precautions to cut down on the misuse of billions of dollars in American aid to the country.
Responding to deepening unease on Capitol Hill about where aid money is going, Mr. Holbrooke said recent reports of billions of dollars in cash being flown out of Kabul International Airport wrongly suggested that American civilian aid was being siphoned from Afghanistan.
“We’re not missing money,” Mr. Holbrooke said at a hearing of the House subcommittee that oversees financing of the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development. The shortage of banks in Afghanistan, he said, means that Afghans use cash for most commercial transactions, which they then transfer, legally, in vast amounts to banks in Dubai.
Mr. Holbrooke acknowledged that some of the money probably came from illegal activities like drug trafficking. He said corruption was still endemic in Afghanistan, describing it as a “malignancy” that could destroy everything the United States was trying to achieve there. The Taliban, in their propaganda, highlight the corruption of local officials to lure people to the insurgency.
“If you read Taliban propaganda, which we study very carefully, they never mention the issue of women, girls in school, because that was their most losing issue,” Mr. Holbrooke said. “What they talk about is corruption, which is why we’re here. That’s their No. 1 recruiting tool.”
Fears about the misuse of aid has led the chairwoman of the subcommittee, Representative Nita M. Lowey, to hold up $3.9 billion in financing until the administration puts in place adequate safeguards to ensure that the money is not being squandered. The decision will not affect existing programs, she said, since there is money in the pipeline for this year and next.
Ms. Lowey, a Democrat from New York, expressed skepticism that the capital flight from Afghanistan did not include American aid money. “At this moment, we don’t know where that $3 billion came from,” she said, referring to an estimate, cited by The Wall Street Journal, of how much has left the country.
A spokesman for Ms. Lowey, Matthew Dennis, said she would work with the administration to develop safeguards. Congress could restore civilian aid to its foreign assistance package after the August recess.
Mr. Holbrooke and Rajiv Shah, the administrator of the Agency for International Development, provided charts to show how the administration certified Afghan ministries, monitored programs and used third-party auditors to make sure aid was properly spent. Even so, Dr. Shah said, it is not easy to determine whether the aid is effective. For example, the United States has not measured the effect of agricultural aid on crop yields or the incomes of farmers.
The largely cash nature of the Afghan economy complicates efforts to crack down on corruption, Mr. Holbrooke said. Afghanistan has only 17 active banks, and barely 5 percent of Afghans have bank accounts.
Still, Mr. Holbrooke said, the anticorruption campaign has yielded some results. The Afghan government’s major-crimes task force, he said, has 169 investigators working on 36 cases. One involved two people with both Afghan and American citizenship who were part of a $3 million kickback scheme on an $18 million road project. They were arrested in Afghanistan with the help of the Justice Department, brought to the United States, tried and sentenced to prison in Virginia.
“Is it enough? Of course not,” he said. “Circumstances and the history of the country make it difficult.”
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