The corruption scandal of course is secondary to the ongoing drone killing fields scandals....
http://news.antiwar.com/2013/04/07/us-airstrikes-kills-11-children-in-afghan-border-village/
Provincial officials checked the houses, however, and found a grim consequence of the bombing campaign: a large number of women and children within were killed and injured beneath the rubble of their homes. 11 children in all were reported killed, and one woman. Several other women were badly wounded.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/SOU-03-030413.html
The Great Afghan corruption scam
By Dilip Hiro
Washington has vociferously denounced Afghan corruption as a major obstacle to the United States' mission in Afghanistan. This has been widely reported. Only one crucial element is missing from this routine censure: a credible explanation of why American nation-building failed there. No wonder. To do so, the US would have to denounce itself.
Corruption in Afghanistan today is acute and permeates all sectors of society. In recent years, anecdotal evidence on the subject has been superseded by the studies of researchers, surveys by NGOs, and periodic reports by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNDOC). There is also the Corruption Perceptions Index of the Berlin-based Transparency International. Last year, it bracketed Afghanistan with two other countries as the most corrupt.
None of these documents, however, refers to the single most important fact when it comes to corruption: that it is Washington-based. It is, in fact, rooted in the massive build-up of US forces there from 2005 onward, the accompanying expansion of American forward operating bases, camps, and combat outposts from 29 in 2005 to nearly 400 five years later, and above all, the tsunami of cash that went with all of this.
Last month, when an Afghan court sentenced Sher Khan Farnood and Khalil Ullah Ferozi, the chairman and chief executive of Kabul Bank, for looting its deposits in a gigantic Ponzi scheme, the event received some media attention. Typically, however, the critical role of the Americans in the bank's murky past was missing in action.
Founded as a private company in 2004, Kabul Bank was promptly hailed by American officials in Afghanistan as a linchpin in the country's emerging free-market economic order. In 2005, action followed words. The Pentagon, paymaster for the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), signed a contract with the bank to disperse the salaries of ANSF soldiers and policemen.
With that, the fledgling financial institution acquired an impressive cash flow. Moreover, such blatant American support generated confidence among better-off Afghans. Soon enough, they were lining up to deposit their money. Starting in 2006, the surging inflow of cash encouraged Farnood and Ferozi to begin skimming off depositors' funds as unsecured loans to themselves through fake front companies. Thus was born the world's largest banking scam (when calculated as a percentage of the country's gross domestic product) with the US Embassy in Kabul acting as its midwife.
How it all happened
There exists a statistical connection between the sums expended by Washington in Afghanistan and worsening corruption in that hapless nation. It is to be found in Transparency InternationaI's Corruption Index. In 2005, Afghanistan ranked 117th among the 158 countries surveyed. By 2007, as American greenbacks poured into the country, only two of 179 nations surpassed it in corruption. Since 2011, it has remained at the very bottom of that index.
What changed between 2005 and 2007? By the spring of 2006, the Taliban insurgency had already gained control of 20 districts in the southern part of the country and was challenging US and NATO forces in the strategic Kandahar area. With a sectarian war by then raging in US-occupied Iraq, secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld felt that he could increase the American military presence in Afghanistan only marginally.
This started to change when Robert Gates took over at the Pentagon in December 2006. He began bolstering US combat units there. As a result, forward operating bases multiplied, as did combat outposts and military camps. Building new sites or upgrading old ones on the double meant that the Pentagon started awarding contracts to local Afghan construction companies unaccustomed to handling such tasks quickly. They, in turn, subcontracted tasks out to those who greased their palms. With the infusion of ever more piles of Pentagon dollars, corruption only spread.
Later, each of these bases and outposts had to be supplied with food, water, fuel, and other necessities as well as war materials. In addition, the Pentagon accelerated its program of bolstering the nascent Afghan security forces by covering the full cost of training, equipping, and paying its personnel, as well as building bases and outposts for them. As a consequence, contracts to Afghan transport companies ballooned, as would contracts to Afghan private security outfits to protect the trucks hauling provisions and materials in that increasingly war-torn country.
So, of course, did the opportunities for graft.
Between 2005 and 2007, when American combat forces in Afghanistan doubled, the Pentagon's budget for the Afghan War leaped from US$17.2 billion to $34.9 billion annually. ANSF personnel also doubled, from 66,000 to 125,000 troops and policemen, though at a relatively marginal cost to the Pentagon. At $16,000 a year, the burden of maintaining an Afghan soldier was a paltry 2% of the $800,000 it cost to maintain his American counterpart.
In this period, opportunities for corruption rose exponentially. Why? In part, because the Pentagon was unable to protect the supply convoys of its Afghan contractors, something that would have required tens of thousands more US troops. The distance between the main supply center at Bagram Air Base near the capital Kabul and the city of Kandahar in the Taliban-infested south was 300 miles (480 kilometers); and the Taliban heartland in Helmand Province lay another 100 miles from Kandahar. Since Afghanistan lacks railroads, the only way to transport goods and people was to use the roads.
The Bagram-Kandahar highway was peppered with roadblocks, each manned by the armed fighters of the dominant warlord, who collected an arbitrary ''transit tax''. The only way the transport companies could perform their job was by buying safe passage from the rulers of the highway and so parting with bribes of approximately $1,500 per truck between Bagram and Kandahar, and another $1,500 between Kandahar and Helmand. All of this came from the cash the Pentagon was so profligately doling out.
The warlords and private security contractors, in turn, gave bribes to the Taliban for the safe passage of these convoys. In essence, therefore, the Pentagon was helping finance its enemy in order to distribute necessary supplies to its bases. In addition, on ''safe'' roads, checkpoints were often manned by Afghan policemen, who extorted bribes by threatening to pass advance information about a convoy on to the Taliban.
This process became an important element in systematic graft on a grand scale triggered by the $60 billion a year that the Pentagon was, by 2009, spending on its Afghan War.
Then there were the petty bribes that ordinary Afghans regularly pay to civil servants and policemen. These are extracted from citizens for favors or preferential treatment by officials in public service ministries when it comes to such basics as gaining entrance to school for a child, securing a bed in a hospital, or getting a driver's license or building permit. They represent a commonplace phenomenon not just in Afghanistan, but also elsewhere in South and Southwest Asia.
While ignoring Pentagon-financed sleaze on an industrial scale, the NGOs and UNDOC go through the ritual of quantifying corruption in the country by questioning a sample of Afghans regarding the small bribes - popularly called baksheesh (literally, ''gratuity'') - they pay to public officials. They come up with such earth-shaking conclusions as that 50% of the population paid a bribe in 2012, ''down'' from 58% in 2009 (the year of the previous survey).
A 2009 survey by Integrity Watch Afghanistan (IWA) focusing on petty or administrative corruption put the total for such bribery nationally at $1 billion - less, that is, than half the $2.16 billion that the Pentagon disbursed in a single gigantic contract under the label of ''Host Nation Trucking'' for ferrying supplies to its bases.
Soaking the Pentagon-funded security forces
Another major source of systematic corruption: the filching of Pentagon money via salaries paid to ''ghost soldiers'' and policemen, recruits enrolled in the Afghan security forces who don't exist. Here, too, Washington's funds became the basis for embezzlement and ''Afghan'' corruption.
Up to 90% of Afghan troops and police are illiterate, and about a quarter of the force deserts annually. This has provided rich opportunities for commanders to pad their lists of soldiers with so-called ghosts, keep them on the books, and pocket their salaries. (It is worth recalling that this practice became similarly widespread in the South Vietnamese army during the American war in Vietnam.)
Besides filching salaries, enterprising police and army commanders have made money by reselling Pentagon war materials. For instance, according to documents leaked by the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks, a police chief in the eastern town of Zurmat reported fictitious firefights with the Taliban, and upon being restocked with thousands of rounds of ammunition, sold them to a bazaar merchant. Another provincial police commissioner purloined food and uniforms, while leaving his men cold and underfed in the winter. Such acts led to the creation of a significant black market in US military equipment and goods of every sort.
In its drive to win the hearts and minds of Afghan villagers, the Pentagon's policymakers also gave cash directly to US officers to fund the building of wells, schools, and health clinics in areas where they were posted. The stress was on quick, visible results - and they were indeed quick and visible: the funds generally ended up in the pockets of rural power brokers with little oversight and no accountability, particularly when the American officer involved usually left the area after a relatively brief tour of duty.
Later, the State Department's Agency for International Development (USAID) took over this role. As with the Pentagon, most of the money it distributed ended up in the pockets of those local power brokers. By some accounts, USAID lost up to 90 cents of each dollar spent on certain projects. According to a congressional report published in June 2011, much of the $19 billion in foreign aid that the US pumped into Afghanistan after 2001 was probably destabilizing the country in the long term.
Staggering amounts of US taxpayer dollars allocated to aid Afghanistan were spent so quickly and profligately that they circumvented any anti-corruption, transparency, or accountability controls and safeguards that existed on paper. However, those who amassed bags full of dollars faced a problem. Afghanistan's underdeveloped $12 billion economy - a sum Washington spent in that country in a single month in 2011 - did not offer many avenues for legitimate profitable investment. Therefore, most of this cash garnered on a colossal scale exited the country, large parts of it ending up in banks and real estate in the Gulf emirates, especially freewheeling Dubai.
US diplomats ignored Kabul Bank shenanigans
Kabul Bank caught the essence of all this in a single Afghan institution, the brainchild of an Afghan who stood out as a man for all seasons. In their enthusiasm to welcome the founding of an ambitious private bank, American officials, wedded to their free-market theology, overlooked the shady background of Kabul Bank chairman Farnood.
An ethnic Uzbek, he moved to Moscow during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Toward the end of that decade, he started an informal money transfer business, or hawala, that would prove useful for drug smugglers who wanted to transfer their cash into Afghanistan and the adjoining Socialist Republic of Tajikistan.
Before the Russian authorities shut down his outfit for money laundering in 1998, Farnood escaped to Dubai. As the main hub of the hawala business covering Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and the Indian subcontinent, it was a perfect refuge for him. There he also became known as a sharp poker player.
The Russian interior ministry pursued him, but by 2007, when it got Interpol to issue an arrest warrant for him, he was the honorable chairman of Kabul Bank (with his former bodyguard, Ferozi, as its chief executive officer). And his bank had acquired nearly a million customers, including 250,000 Afghan security soldiers and policemen. Unsurprisingly, the interior ministry in Kabul ignored the Interpol warrant. So apparently did the US Embassy in Kabul.
When news of his jaw-dropping embezzlement and Ponzi scheme broke in September 2010, USAID officials expressed surprise and shock. They would have had to be blind and deaf not to have seen or heard the dark rumors about their star financial institution that had already been swirling around Kabul's diplomatic and financial circles. They could not, however, maintain the charade of ignorance once WikiLeaks published Kabul embassy cables, some of them dating from 2009, mentioning the bank's scandalous transgressions.
By September 2010, almost $1 billion had gone missing from the bank, with Farnood and Ferozi pocketing $900 million, significant amounts of which they invested in luxurious villas in Dubai. Last month, a few liberal Western journalists made a point of the way Afghan judges had dropped the most serious charges of embezzlement, forgery, and money laundering against Farnood and Ferozi, convicting them instead of ''breach of trust''.
However, none of the journalists or commentators pointed out the inconvenient fact that US officials had heartily approved of the bank's founding, had helped raise its stature and improve its cash flow, and had later overlooked the egregious misdeeds of its prime founders.
In the next two years, as Washington draws down its forces in Afghanistan and the situation there disintegrates further, there will undoubtedly be more stories about ''Afghan'' corruption. Given that, it's well worth recalling the following facts: it was the US that flooded the country with military and aid funds, while expediently skipping any process of oversight, and so turned Operation Enduring Freedom into Operation Enduring Corruption.
Still, Karzai is putting the Americans on notice that, this time, it is the Afghans who are calling the shots. He's giving them payback for the many humiliations they inflicted upon him in years past, like when former US special envoy Richard Holbrooke tried to replace Karzai with his political rival during the last presidential election.
Other Western diplomats also just shrug their shoulders. After all, they reason, the fight against the narcostate isn't part of the UN mandate, and embassies and military bases are not "law-enforcement agencies." There is no lack of knowledge about what is going on, but who wants to get back into it with re-strengthened warlords? "Almost all of these criminals have ultimately gotten what they wanted. Only the Taliban is still fighting against us," says one Western military officer.
http://news.antiwar.com/2013/04/07/us-airstrikes-kills-11-children-in-afghan-border-village/
US Airstrikes Kills 11 Children in Afghan Border Village
Destroyed Several Houses, Killing Women and Children Within
by Jason Ditz, April 07, 2013
US warplanes pounded the village of Shigal in the Kunar Province of Afghanistan today, destroying several houses in the course of a “support” operation that NATO officials bragged led to the deaths of two “senior Taliban leaders.” The village was just miles from the Pakistan border.
Provincial officials checked the houses, however, and found a grim consequence of the bombing campaign: a large number of women and children within were killed and injured beneath the rubble of their homes. 11 children in all were reported killed, and one woman. Several other women were badly wounded.
The official narrative surrounding the story is still nebulous, because while NATO insists that no NATO ground troops were involved in the raids, they also claimed it was NATO troops that had called in the strikes after “coming under attack.” A Kunar MP suggested there were no ground troops at all in the area, and that it was considered a “Taliban stronghold” which is why the attacks occurred.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has repeatedly banned NATO air strikes against populated areas, and has also banned Afghan forces from requesting air support if they are attacked in an area where civilians might be impacted. The bans appear to be having little to no impact, however.
The US has yet to respond to the killings, while NATO says only that they are “aware” on the incident and will conduct some sort of assessment. Such assessments have rarely amounted to anything, however, with after the fact statements, if they come at all, insisting the Taliban are to blame for whoever the US bombs in the course of trying to kill Taliban fighters.
and.......
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/04/06/6-americans-doctor-killed-in-afghan-attacks/
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan – Six American troops and civilians and an Afghan doctor were killed in attacks on Saturday in southern and eastern Afghanistan as the U.S. military's top officer began a weekend visit to the country, officials said.
In the south, three U.S. service members, two U.S. civilians and the doctor were killed when a suicide bomber detonated a car full of explosives just as a convoy with the international military coalition drove past another convoy of vehicles carrying the governor of Zabul province.
Another American civilian was killed in an insurgent attack in eastern Afghanistan, the U.S. military said in a statement.
The attacks occurred the same day that U.S. Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, arrived in Afghanistan for a visit aimed at assessing the level of training that American troops can provide to Afghan security forces after international combat forces complete their withdrawal at the end of 2014.
Those killed in Zabul province included three members of the military and two U.S. civilians, including at least one employee with the U.S. State Department, said a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity ahead of a formal announcement. Several other Americans and Afghans, possibly as many as nine, were wounded, the official said.
The U.S. Embassy in Kabul confirmed that Americans were involved in an attack in Qalat, the capital of Zabul province. Zabul is next to Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban, and shares a volatile border with Pakistan.
"There are American and Afghan casualties. We are still investigating the incident and cannot confirm details at this time," the embassy said in a statement.
There were no immediate claims of responsibility for the attacks.
The deaths bring the number of foreign military forces killed this year to 30, including 22 Americans. A total of six foreign civilians have died in Afghanistan so far this year, according to an Associated Press count.
It was unclear if the car bomber was targeting the coalition convoy or that of Provincial Gov. Mohammad Ashraf Nasery, who was driving to an event at a nearby school in Qalat. The explosion occurred in front of a hospital.
Nasery, who survived the attack, said the car bomb exploded as his convoy was passing the hospital. He said a doctor was killed, and two of his bodyguards and a student from the school were wounded. The coalition convoy was leaving a base that is home to a provincial reconstruction team, or PRT, officials said.
"The governor's convoy was at the gate of the school," provincial police chief Gen. Ghulam Sakhi Rooghlawanay said. "At the same time the (coalition) convoy came out from the PRT and was passing by that place. The suicide bomber blew himself up between the two convoys."
Nasery said he thought his convoy was the intended target.
"I'm safe and healthy," he told The Associated Press in a telephone call. "The target was my vehicle, but I survived."
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/SOU-03-030413.html
The Great Afghan corruption scam
By Dilip Hiro
Washington has vociferously denounced Afghan corruption as a major obstacle to the United States' mission in Afghanistan. This has been widely reported. Only one crucial element is missing from this routine censure: a credible explanation of why American nation-building failed there. No wonder. To do so, the US would have to denounce itself.
Corruption in Afghanistan today is acute and permeates all sectors of society. In recent years, anecdotal evidence on the subject has been superseded by the studies of researchers, surveys by NGOs, and periodic reports by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNDOC). There is also the Corruption Perceptions Index of the Berlin-based Transparency International. Last year, it bracketed Afghanistan with two other countries as the most corrupt.
None of these documents, however, refers to the single most important fact when it comes to corruption: that it is Washington-based. It is, in fact, rooted in the massive build-up of US forces there from 2005 onward, the accompanying expansion of American forward operating bases, camps, and combat outposts from 29 in 2005 to nearly 400 five years later, and above all, the tsunami of cash that went with all of this.
Last month, when an Afghan court sentenced Sher Khan Farnood and Khalil Ullah Ferozi, the chairman and chief executive of Kabul Bank, for looting its deposits in a gigantic Ponzi scheme, the event received some media attention. Typically, however, the critical role of the Americans in the bank's murky past was missing in action.
Founded as a private company in 2004, Kabul Bank was promptly hailed by American officials in Afghanistan as a linchpin in the country's emerging free-market economic order. In 2005, action followed words. The Pentagon, paymaster for the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), signed a contract with the bank to disperse the salaries of ANSF soldiers and policemen.
With that, the fledgling financial institution acquired an impressive cash flow. Moreover, such blatant American support generated confidence among better-off Afghans. Soon enough, they were lining up to deposit their money. Starting in 2006, the surging inflow of cash encouraged Farnood and Ferozi to begin skimming off depositors' funds as unsecured loans to themselves through fake front companies. Thus was born the world's largest banking scam (when calculated as a percentage of the country's gross domestic product) with the US Embassy in Kabul acting as its midwife.
How it all happened
There exists a statistical connection between the sums expended by Washington in Afghanistan and worsening corruption in that hapless nation. It is to be found in Transparency InternationaI's Corruption Index. In 2005, Afghanistan ranked 117th among the 158 countries surveyed. By 2007, as American greenbacks poured into the country, only two of 179 nations surpassed it in corruption. Since 2011, it has remained at the very bottom of that index.
What changed between 2005 and 2007? By the spring of 2006, the Taliban insurgency had already gained control of 20 districts in the southern part of the country and was challenging US and NATO forces in the strategic Kandahar area. With a sectarian war by then raging in US-occupied Iraq, secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld felt that he could increase the American military presence in Afghanistan only marginally.
This started to change when Robert Gates took over at the Pentagon in December 2006. He began bolstering US combat units there. As a result, forward operating bases multiplied, as did combat outposts and military camps. Building new sites or upgrading old ones on the double meant that the Pentagon started awarding contracts to local Afghan construction companies unaccustomed to handling such tasks quickly. They, in turn, subcontracted tasks out to those who greased their palms. With the infusion of ever more piles of Pentagon dollars, corruption only spread.
Later, each of these bases and outposts had to be supplied with food, water, fuel, and other necessities as well as war materials. In addition, the Pentagon accelerated its program of bolstering the nascent Afghan security forces by covering the full cost of training, equipping, and paying its personnel, as well as building bases and outposts for them. As a consequence, contracts to Afghan transport companies ballooned, as would contracts to Afghan private security outfits to protect the trucks hauling provisions and materials in that increasingly war-torn country.
So, of course, did the opportunities for graft.
Between 2005 and 2007, when American combat forces in Afghanistan doubled, the Pentagon's budget for the Afghan War leaped from US$17.2 billion to $34.9 billion annually. ANSF personnel also doubled, from 66,000 to 125,000 troops and policemen, though at a relatively marginal cost to the Pentagon. At $16,000 a year, the burden of maintaining an Afghan soldier was a paltry 2% of the $800,000 it cost to maintain his American counterpart.
In this period, opportunities for corruption rose exponentially. Why? In part, because the Pentagon was unable to protect the supply convoys of its Afghan contractors, something that would have required tens of thousands more US troops. The distance between the main supply center at Bagram Air Base near the capital Kabul and the city of Kandahar in the Taliban-infested south was 300 miles (480 kilometers); and the Taliban heartland in Helmand Province lay another 100 miles from Kandahar. Since Afghanistan lacks railroads, the only way to transport goods and people was to use the roads.
The Bagram-Kandahar highway was peppered with roadblocks, each manned by the armed fighters of the dominant warlord, who collected an arbitrary ''transit tax''. The only way the transport companies could perform their job was by buying safe passage from the rulers of the highway and so parting with bribes of approximately $1,500 per truck between Bagram and Kandahar, and another $1,500 between Kandahar and Helmand. All of this came from the cash the Pentagon was so profligately doling out.
The warlords and private security contractors, in turn, gave bribes to the Taliban for the safe passage of these convoys. In essence, therefore, the Pentagon was helping finance its enemy in order to distribute necessary supplies to its bases. In addition, on ''safe'' roads, checkpoints were often manned by Afghan policemen, who extorted bribes by threatening to pass advance information about a convoy on to the Taliban.
This process became an important element in systematic graft on a grand scale triggered by the $60 billion a year that the Pentagon was, by 2009, spending on its Afghan War.
Then there were the petty bribes that ordinary Afghans regularly pay to civil servants and policemen. These are extracted from citizens for favors or preferential treatment by officials in public service ministries when it comes to such basics as gaining entrance to school for a child, securing a bed in a hospital, or getting a driver's license or building permit. They represent a commonplace phenomenon not just in Afghanistan, but also elsewhere in South and Southwest Asia.
While ignoring Pentagon-financed sleaze on an industrial scale, the NGOs and UNDOC go through the ritual of quantifying corruption in the country by questioning a sample of Afghans regarding the small bribes - popularly called baksheesh (literally, ''gratuity'') - they pay to public officials. They come up with such earth-shaking conclusions as that 50% of the population paid a bribe in 2012, ''down'' from 58% in 2009 (the year of the previous survey).
A 2009 survey by Integrity Watch Afghanistan (IWA) focusing on petty or administrative corruption put the total for such bribery nationally at $1 billion - less, that is, than half the $2.16 billion that the Pentagon disbursed in a single gigantic contract under the label of ''Host Nation Trucking'' for ferrying supplies to its bases.
Soaking the Pentagon-funded security forces
Another major source of systematic corruption: the filching of Pentagon money via salaries paid to ''ghost soldiers'' and policemen, recruits enrolled in the Afghan security forces who don't exist. Here, too, Washington's funds became the basis for embezzlement and ''Afghan'' corruption.
Up to 90% of Afghan troops and police are illiterate, and about a quarter of the force deserts annually. This has provided rich opportunities for commanders to pad their lists of soldiers with so-called ghosts, keep them on the books, and pocket their salaries. (It is worth recalling that this practice became similarly widespread in the South Vietnamese army during the American war in Vietnam.)
Besides filching salaries, enterprising police and army commanders have made money by reselling Pentagon war materials. For instance, according to documents leaked by the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks, a police chief in the eastern town of Zurmat reported fictitious firefights with the Taliban, and upon being restocked with thousands of rounds of ammunition, sold them to a bazaar merchant. Another provincial police commissioner purloined food and uniforms, while leaving his men cold and underfed in the winter. Such acts led to the creation of a significant black market in US military equipment and goods of every sort.
In its drive to win the hearts and minds of Afghan villagers, the Pentagon's policymakers also gave cash directly to US officers to fund the building of wells, schools, and health clinics in areas where they were posted. The stress was on quick, visible results - and they were indeed quick and visible: the funds generally ended up in the pockets of rural power brokers with little oversight and no accountability, particularly when the American officer involved usually left the area after a relatively brief tour of duty.
Later, the State Department's Agency for International Development (USAID) took over this role. As with the Pentagon, most of the money it distributed ended up in the pockets of those local power brokers. By some accounts, USAID lost up to 90 cents of each dollar spent on certain projects. According to a congressional report published in June 2011, much of the $19 billion in foreign aid that the US pumped into Afghanistan after 2001 was probably destabilizing the country in the long term.
Staggering amounts of US taxpayer dollars allocated to aid Afghanistan were spent so quickly and profligately that they circumvented any anti-corruption, transparency, or accountability controls and safeguards that existed on paper. However, those who amassed bags full of dollars faced a problem. Afghanistan's underdeveloped $12 billion economy - a sum Washington spent in that country in a single month in 2011 - did not offer many avenues for legitimate profitable investment. Therefore, most of this cash garnered on a colossal scale exited the country, large parts of it ending up in banks and real estate in the Gulf emirates, especially freewheeling Dubai.
US diplomats ignored Kabul Bank shenanigans
Kabul Bank caught the essence of all this in a single Afghan institution, the brainchild of an Afghan who stood out as a man for all seasons. In their enthusiasm to welcome the founding of an ambitious private bank, American officials, wedded to their free-market theology, overlooked the shady background of Kabul Bank chairman Farnood.
An ethnic Uzbek, he moved to Moscow during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Toward the end of that decade, he started an informal money transfer business, or hawala, that would prove useful for drug smugglers who wanted to transfer their cash into Afghanistan and the adjoining Socialist Republic of Tajikistan.
Before the Russian authorities shut down his outfit for money laundering in 1998, Farnood escaped to Dubai. As the main hub of the hawala business covering Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and the Indian subcontinent, it was a perfect refuge for him. There he also became known as a sharp poker player.
The Russian interior ministry pursued him, but by 2007, when it got Interpol to issue an arrest warrant for him, he was the honorable chairman of Kabul Bank (with his former bodyguard, Ferozi, as its chief executive officer). And his bank had acquired nearly a million customers, including 250,000 Afghan security soldiers and policemen. Unsurprisingly, the interior ministry in Kabul ignored the Interpol warrant. So apparently did the US Embassy in Kabul.
When news of his jaw-dropping embezzlement and Ponzi scheme broke in September 2010, USAID officials expressed surprise and shock. They would have had to be blind and deaf not to have seen or heard the dark rumors about their star financial institution that had already been swirling around Kabul's diplomatic and financial circles. They could not, however, maintain the charade of ignorance once WikiLeaks published Kabul embassy cables, some of them dating from 2009, mentioning the bank's scandalous transgressions.
By September 2010, almost $1 billion had gone missing from the bank, with Farnood and Ferozi pocketing $900 million, significant amounts of which they invested in luxurious villas in Dubai. Last month, a few liberal Western journalists made a point of the way Afghan judges had dropped the most serious charges of embezzlement, forgery, and money laundering against Farnood and Ferozi, convicting them instead of ''breach of trust''.
However, none of the journalists or commentators pointed out the inconvenient fact that US officials had heartily approved of the bank's founding, had helped raise its stature and improve its cash flow, and had later overlooked the egregious misdeeds of its prime founders.
In the next two years, as Washington draws down its forces in Afghanistan and the situation there disintegrates further, there will undoubtedly be more stories about ''Afghan'' corruption. Given that, it's well worth recalling the following facts: it was the US that flooded the country with military and aid funds, while expediently skipping any process of oversight, and so turned Operation Enduring Freedom into Operation Enduring Corruption.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/washington-favors-exit-over-fight-with-karzai-in-afghanistan-a-892823.html
Given that friendship between Hamid Karzai and the Americans has long been a thing of the past, the negotiations are dogged. For weeks now, the Afghan president has been haggling with the United State over its troop withdrawal. At issue are the limits of what US soldiers will still be permitted to do in the country after 2014, when plans call for only 5,000 to 10,000 American troops to remain in Afghanistan. The sides are at odds over questions of jurisdiction. Afghanistan's parliament wants to be able to prosecute American soldiers in Afghan courts. But, says one US diplomat, "That will never happen."
ANZEIGE
For example, Karzai recently ordered elite US soldiers to pull out as quickly as possible from Wardak Province, an important gateway for insurgents headed toward Kabul. The soldiers have been accused of abusing villagers, but the accusation has yet to be substantiated.
Airline Under Radar of US Investigators
Just how poisoned relations have become can be seen particularly clearly in the way Afghans reacted to an order handed down by General James Mattis, until recently the highest-ranking US officer responsible for Afghanistan. In January, Mattis placed Kam Air, a private airline, on the blacklist of companies no longer allowed to receive contracts from the US military. The Americans suspect Kam Air of having smuggled bulk quantities of narcotics to Central Asia on passenger flights.
Of course, something like this isn't all that atypical. The United States has repeatedly excluded companies from lucrative contracts when it has deemed them to be corrupt or criminal. Until now, though, Karzai and officials at the Presidential Palace hadn't protested against such actions. But the case of Kam Air has touched a sensitive spot in the web of relations that Karzai has been carefully spinning for more than a decade. Palace insiders say Karzei has transformed the putative democracy into a kingdom completely tailored to him: Call it Karzai's Corruptistan.
In an unusually harshly formulated official communiqué to US Ambassador James Cunningham, Afghan's Foreign Ministry demanded that all documents related to the Kam Air case be made available to the Afghan government immediately. President Karzai's office has even threatened to file a "compensation/damages suit" against the US military if no concrete proof of the allegations is supplied.
The Afghans' fervent reaction is hard to comprehend, especially given the fact that Kam Air is a completely private company in which the state has no financial stake. But General Mattis had apparently stirred up a hornet's nest. In the end, Mattis was forced to ease the political pressure. In the meantime, Kam Air is once again eligible to bid for US contracts -- with the airy assertion that Kabul will take charge of any investigations itself.
Dirty Political Deal
Zamarai Kamgar, the airline's owner, hails from the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif. He has a reputation for being a lively businessman with shady friends. For decades, he has had close business ties to the warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum. Drug-trading is the mildest of the things that foreign intelligence agencies and human rights advocates have charged the Uzbek general with. At the end of the Taliban's rule over Afghanistan, Dostum allegedly had hundreds of Taliban fighters herded into containers, where they died of asphyxiation before their hasty burial in mass graves. International pressure drove Dostum into exile in Turkey, but President Karzai personally urged the nefarious warrior to return to Afghanistan in 2009.
At the time, Afghanistan's first democratically elected president was fighting to be re-elected. To boost support, Karzai made a dirty deal with the general: The suspected war criminal would be rehabilitated if he could guarantee to add at least half a million Uzbek votes to Karzai's Pashtun power base.
Mixed up in this deal was Zamarai Kamgar, the airline owner and friend of Dostum, who, since Karzai's re-election, has enjoyed excellent ties with the Presidential Palace in Kabul. Karzai has frequently used Kam Air planes himself whenever he or senior government officials jet off for state visits and international conferences.
Jockeying for Lucrative US Contracts
From the outside, Karzai's system of power seems like a labyrinth. A key role in the Kam Air affair has been played by his former deputy chief of staff, Kawun Kakar. The Afghan with US citizenship now works as a lawyer and counts the head of Kam Air among his clients. In the wake of the US ban on the airline, Kakar let it be known that Kamgar was "shocked" by the accusations and assumed that jealous competitors had disseminated false information.
Indeed, Afghan, American and other international suppliers are fighting tooth and nail over the big-money contracts in Afghanistan. For outsourced flights alone, the US military spends roughly $100 million each year.
Kam Air flew onto the Americans' radar when the company submitted a bid last year as a subcontractor for a deal worth millions. The main contract had been secured by Wais Jalali, the son of a former Afghan interior minister who was until recently married to one of Karzai's nieces. It is unclear how Jalali and his Veritas company was able to win the lucrative contract, especially since the Afghan with US citizenship was forced to have one of his other US-registered companies file for bankruptcy. Veritas also doesn't possess any airplanes, which is why Jalali brought Kamgar on board.
This constellation of figures attracted the Americans' attention. And when they took a closer look at the airline, they apparently found indications of a drug connection.
Resigned to Failure
Afghanistan produces 80 percent of all the opium consumed worldwide, and most of those in power profit from its trade. Nevertheless, not a single one of the top-level drug barons with ties to Karzai's network has yet to be convicted. Overzealous police chiefs are replaced before they can track down smugglers. And, as one general who used to be responsible for security at Kabul's airport says, "Kabul Airport is like a heavily protected mosque at the main entrance -- but there are three open doors out back."
Expert observers warn that Afghanistan could wind up becoming a narcostate after Western troops withdraw, one in which politicians, businesspeople and criminals seamlessly cooperate. Indeed, this could soon become a reality.
"We would have had to reveal our classified sources, which would have only led to additional entanglements," says one US diplomat in explaining why the Americans allowed Kam Air to bid for contracts again. Getting into a fight with President Karzai about such a touchy subject during the negotiations over future US troop strengths and rules of engagement, he adds, would have carried too high a price.
Given all this, what is left of the mission in Afghanistan?
- A state with a security apparatus that might be strong enough to at best hold the Taliban halfway in check.
- A country whose order will be guaranteed by brutal warlords.
- And a president who will play the kingmaker and wait until the last moment to reveal the person he will back as his successor and who will look like a puppet of Karzai's interests when the latter steps down next year.
Is that what a successful mission looks like? "Of course," quips one Western diplomat. "We declare victory, and then we leave."
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