Foul play in Kabul

Kabul is struggling to set the record straight now that an influential lobby in Washington is trying to pass the blame of the faltering US war in Afghanistan on to the Karzai regime. Democratic Congressman Rick Larsen, a member of the influential Congressional Armed Services Committee, was the latest in a row of Washington bigwigs to blame the Karzai regime for everything that was going wrong in Afghanistan.
Mr Larsen declaimed last week that the war on terror is failing because the Karzai adm­inistration is thoroughly corrupt and cannot deliver the basics to the common Afghan people. Aid money is allegedly being pilfered by Hamid Karzai, his family and coterie leaving nothing for the country’s impoverished masses. A population without basic services that ought to be provided by the state is progressively turning to the Taliban. This, Congressman Larsen and others in his camp aver, is at the root of the US failure to combat the Taliban. “I think the patience of the American people is almost done”, the Congressman declared after visiting Kabul last week.
A number of Americans in high positions have been angered by reports of bagfuls of money being physically carried out of Kabul airport and invested in Dubai. The founder and chairman of the Kabul Bank, Sherkhan Farnood, stepped down recently ostensibly because he was believed to be running a hawala racket to launder political money. The latest refrain in Washington, as US secretary of defence Robert Gates reiterated, is that the US is “committed to enforcing a hard line against the corruption that exploits the Afghan people and saps their support for their elected government — and that includes making sure American tax dollars and other assistance are not being misused”.
Persuasive stuff but not entirely true according to the Afghans, who remain in charge of a teetering regime in Kabul. If anything, it is their patience with the United States that seems to be at an end. “We have lost the focus in the war”, lamented Rangin Dafdar Spanta, national security adviser to President Karzai. A bitter critic of the latest US litany, Mr Spanta does not deny the existence of corruption in the Afghan government or the need to fight it. He argues, however, that it is absurd to suggest that corruption is the cause of the continued conflict in the country.
In a hard hitting op-ed piece carried by the Washington Post last month, Mr Spanta argued that the biggest mistake of the United States was to embrace as a strategic partner the very nation that has, in fact, been nurturing terrorism. “Britain, Spain, Turkey, China, Germany and India have all been victims not of Afghan corruption but of international terrorism — emanating from the region”, he wrote, repeating that the real issue that needs to be addressed is the support the Pakistani military and intelligence agencies provide to the jihadi fighters.
Bringing the same message to New Delhi, Mr Spanta said that instead of rewarding Pakistan’s military establishment with billions of dollars of aid, the world must impose sanctions on that country. That Mr Spanta is speaking for the entire Karzai administration is evident. For, President Karzai, in a meeting with the new US Centcom chief, Gen. James Matis, gave Mr Spanta’s line — that fighting terrorism would fail as long as its sanctuaries remain outside Afghanistan’s borders. He repeated the same to a team of visiting US Congressmen.
The cumulative Afghan war cost since 2001 for the United States alone is touching $336 billion. The total cumulative US economic assistance to Afghanistan, on the other hand, adds up to $52 billion of which economic aid is about $14 billion. The bulk of US money is spent by US agencies like the department of defence, United States Agency for International Development and the Drug Enforcement Agency. It is estimated that of the total non-military aid pledged by donor countries, less than a third passes through the hands of the Afghan government.
Corruption moreover is not limited to Afghans. In the Soviet days, Kabul’s main bazaar was full of cheap caviar, vodka and bullets. Today, Kabul boasts of an Obama bazaar where US made rations, chocolates and a lot else are openly traded. A major outlet for American goods has sprouted right outside Bagram, the main US base in the country.
The really big scam is in the reconstruction aid flowing into the country. “An estimated 40 per cent of the [aid] money sp­ent has returned to rich donor countries such as the US thro­u­gh corporate profits, consultant salaries and other costs, vastly pushing up expenditure”, a re­port prepared by the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief revealed. In a book titled War Games: The Story of Aid and War in Modern Times, au­thor Linda Polman writes: “The majority of western NGOs ne­v­er venture outside Kabul. Inst­ead, they subcontract local and other NGOs to implement their projects, which in turn engage further subcontractors. A total of four intermediate organisations, each creaming off a portion, is common. Steadily seeping away, project finance passes from hand to hand until finally someone gets down to bricklaying, carpentry or ploughing”.
Mr Spanta is understandably an angry man. He is watching helplessly as the jihadi hordes batter away at his country’s gates. From his watch tower, the enemy is laughing, literally all the way to the bank.

Indranil Banerjie is a defence and security analyst based in New Delhi