"The Worst:" Former Warlord Manages $2 Billion in U.S and Allied Projects

After this last New Year’s Eve, U.S. taxpayers must resolve to find out where their money is going in Afghanistan. On December 31, the Associated Press reported that US officials had “pressured Afghan President Hamid Karzai to remove a former warlord from atop the energy and water ministry a year ago because they considered him corrupt and ineffective.” Ismail Khan, the “former warlord,” controls “$2 billion in U.S. and allied projects.”

If that’s not troubling enough, then consider the nickname that U.S. diplomats have given him: “the worst.” Indeed, Khan was so bad that US officials “threatened to end aid unless” he was removed. Considering how much money is still being poured into Afghanistan, that seems like a particularly toothless threat. 

Despite President Obama’s belief in an “urgent need for political and economic progress,” stories like this question whether the US can fund necessary development projects in a country so hobbled by graft. This new story on Khan—which was first reported by WikiLeaks—was published only weeks after a New York Times story alleged that Afghani ministers had stolen tens of millions of dollars from their offices.

The U.S. is funding municipal services that are intended to generate “tens of millions in customer fees,” more or less the same model that pays for our water, electricity, and heat. Now, I imagine it’d be difficult to not spend the money on the infrastructure itself—we can see whether or not an electrical plant has been built. And besides, stealing the funding upfront is shortsighted: actually building the infrastructure and then using it to steal from your constituents is a much better long-term investment. Indeed, that’s where the money is being lost: “Many of those fees are lost each year partly due to corruption.”

Naturally, this is all news to Khan himself. “Asked earlier in 2010 about the corruption allegations, Khan. . . did not respond directly to a question whether he was profiting personally from the ministry. He denied any widespread problems of corruption or mismanagement. . . . ‘No money is missing from the ministry,’ he said. ‘All income goes directly to the bank. . . . If there have been complaints [about missing money], nobody has come to tell me.’” 

Hopefully Khan will begin to seriously investigate these claims. And hopefully we as Americans will resolve to protect our investment in Afghanistan by demanding clear accounts for where our money is going, and who is spending it. 

WikiLeaks Document Pervasive Fraud in Afghanistan

There’s not a whole lot of consensus on the pngoing WikiLeaks diplomatic cables scandal. The media doesn’t know whether to cast Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, as a freedom fighter, terrorist, or creep. He’s standing up for transparency. He’s recklessly endangering the United States and its interests. He’s an ego-maniac. He’s an anarchist. He looks kind of like a Bond villain and has a Doomsday Plan (that last one was half judgment-call, half fact). For the record, Assange describes himself as a journalist. Lord knows why anyone would want to refer to themselves that way.

One prevailing sentiment about the leaked diplomatic cables is that, while they’re somewhat embarrassing, most diplomats were talking about what everyone else already knew. The cables (and I love that we’re calling them "cables," like Western Union delivered them) give a bit more legitimacy to claiming that Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is a letch or that the Afghan government is corrupt. But we were doing that anyway.

But just because we knew that then and know more now doesn’t make it OK. Indeed, if anything, these cables should spur us to examine how the US aids Afghanistan, and begin to discuss how we can instill real accountability in that country. We’ve seen the elephant in the room, so let's address it.

In a recent New York Times story detailing the systemic corruption in the Afghanistan government, Scott Shane, Mark Mazzetti, and Dexter Filkins cite a variety of cables indicating that the degree of graft in the Karzai government. “The cables describe a country where everything is for sale. The Transportation Ministry collects $200 million a year in trucking fees, but only $30 million to the government.” The article quotes then-commerce minister Wahidullah Shahrani, who alleged that “individuals pay up to $250,000 for [a government post] in Heart . . . and end up owning beautiful mansions.” Indeed, Ahmed Zia Massoud, the vice president from 2004 to 2009, was allegedly caught “carrying $52 million in unexplained cash” into the United Arab Emirates, where he owns a house on the water in Dubai. There was a Rolls-Royce parked out in front of his home in Dubai, despite the fact that Mr. Massoud’s official salary was “a few hundred dollars a month."

It’s not just the upper level bureaucrats, either: in a recent 60 Minutes segment, Anderson Cooper reported that the U.S. has spent more than $7 billion dollars on the Afghan police force alone—and we don’t even know how many police are on duty.

Until the mining industry moves in to extract the mineral wealth beneath Afghanistan, the government will likely remain the country’s biggest business. In a country that’s being torn apart by war, I imagine that creating a robust accountability office isn’t too high up on anyone’s priorities. But it should be, and it has to be: with America in the grips of a recession and U.S. forces planning their withdrawal, the Afghan government needs to step up and build an institution that will endure and protect its people, rather than robbing their people.

It’s not a problem that’s going to go away any time soon: a “largely unregulated banking infrastructure and the ancient hawala money transfer network” makes it easy to move money around, especially if no one knows it’s missing. It seems that the only infrastructure there is the kind empowering this sort of behavior.

It’s hard to sit here in the States and lecture a country on its fiscal responsibility, especially when girls are getting acid tossed in their faces for going to school. But this problem isn’t going away, likely because of its very nature: it’s complex, and it’s not particularly sexy. But addressing it will create something real in Afghanistan, something that will endure. And as easy as it is for me to criticize, I’ve got a right to do so: I’m paying for it, after all. And I bet you are too. We’re building it. In a weird way, we’ve become investors in Afghanistan. And while we’ll never profit in it financially, we can still make sure that we get our money’s worth—or at the very least, demand to see where it’s going.