The Jig is Up for the Ghani Government in Afghanistan

There was once a time when the puppet government in Afghanistan convened a loya jirga it was front-page news. No longer. You have to wade seven-paragraphs deep into David Zucchino's "Taliban and U.S. Start New Round of Talks in Qatar" to learn that

Mr. Ghani on Monday convened a traditional grand council assembly, known as a loya jirga, to discuss peace for Afghanistan. About 3,000 delegates from around the country, selected in a process dominated by Mr. Ghani’s supporters, are meeting this week to reach a consensus on peace and a postwar Afghanistan. Their decisions are not legally binding.

Zucchino reported on a bombshell the day prior (see "U.S. Military Stops Counting How Much of Afghanistan Is Controlled by Taliban"). The U.S. military will no longer report how much territory it controls in the country. These assessments, sanguine to begin with, were really the only way for the casual observer to gauge how the war was going. Forums like The Long War Journal would use the same data and come up with a different picture, one more favorable to the Taliban.

The best statement concerning this turn events is provided by John Sopko:

The decision to end the assessments, which have been produced in various forms since at least 2010, was published in the latest quarterly report by the American special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction.

“We’re troubled by it,” the inspector general, John F. Sopko, said in an interview. “It’s like turning off the scoreboard at a football game and saying scoring a touchdown or field goal isn’t important.”

I'd say that when the scoreboard goes dark the game is over.

Combine this with Zalmay Khalilzad statement that "he hopes to reach a final peace agreement before the elections" in September and it's a pretty safe bet that the jig is up for the Ghani government in Kabul.

Sopko Speaks, Again: Root Out Corruption in Afghanistan and the Entire State Collapses

Today's news features several stories on the DEA's $86 million flightless plane meant for counter-narcotics surveillance in the U.S.-created klepto-narco-state of Afghanistan. According to Reuters' Julia Harte writing in "U.S. anti-drug plane for Afghanistan still flightless after $86 million":

The U.S. government spent $86 million over seven years developing a counter-narcotics surveillance aircraft for Afghanistan, but the plane has never carried out a mission and is sitting idle in Delaware, a watchdog said on Wednesday. 

After years of war in Afghanistan, a global hub of opium and hashish production, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration had until now largely avoided criticism for questionable spending of the sort leveled widely against the U.S. military.

But Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz said in a report that an aircraft purchased by the DEA and modified with tens of millions of Defense Department dollars missed every delivery deadline and remained inoperable.

This brings to mind John Sopko, Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), who was at the University of Pittsburgh yesterday giving a speech, "An Existential Threat: U.S. Oversight of and Responses to Corruption in Afghanistan,” at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs.

For years Sopko has been giving these kind of speeches on the U.S. project in Afghanistan. The government there is completely corrupt, and nothing ever changes. A rational person would conclude that corruption is therefore by design. And this is basically what SIGAR Sopko says:

Corruption was not always at the top of the U.S. agenda in Afghanistan. In fact, some would argue that it still is not given the importance it deserves. SIGAR has created an office on Lessons Learned from Afghanistan and is preparing a report on how the U.S. government understood corruption there and sought to combat it. It will show that the U.S. government initially had little understanding that corruption could threaten its entire security and state-building mission. Indeed, during the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and for some years to follow, the United States partnered with abusive warlords and their militias to pursue al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and supported the installation of these warlords and their militias at high levels of the Afghan government. The United States also failed to recognize that vast sums of money injected into the Afghan economy, with limited oversight and pressures to spend, created conditions for corruption. 

Not until 2009-eight years into the reconstruction effort-did the U.S. government begin to understand the connections among a vast, interdependent web of corrupt Afghan officials, criminals, drug traffickers, and insurgents. At that time, a consensus emerged that corruption threatened our core goals: Corruption undermined the legitimacy and viability of the Afghan state, fueled grievances that strengthened the growing insurgency, and sapped resources from the reconstruction effort. 

The problem, then and now, was that combating corruption required the cooperation and political will of Afghan elites whose power relied on the very structures that anticorruption efforts sought to dismantle. While President Ghani has declared a "national jihad" on corruption, as Afghan National Security Advisor Rangin Dadfar Spanta told high-level U.S. officials in 2010, "corruption is not just a problem for the system of governance in Afghanistan; it is the system of governance."[1] And since corruption is embedded in the state, it is difficult to root out without destroying the state in the process.

Nothing improves in Afghanistan because the U.S.-backed government is a kleptocracy. In the West we call it neoliberalism,

Obama's Stabilization Projects in Afghanistan: The Final Nail in COIN's Coffin

When I was at the university I studied philosophy. One night, I think I was reading Plato, it dawned on me that at root what philosophers do is take one core insight, one moment of clarity, and then build a system around it; thereby transmogrifying truth into error.

After yesterday reading James Risen's "Afghans See Taliban as a Key to U.S. Aid Projects, Study Finds," and then this morning seeing the headlines about a Navy SEALs detainee abuse scandal in Kalach, Afghanistan (the SEALs were in Kalach on a training mission for the Afghan Local Police), I thought again about my college epiphany. And what I thought about was history. If philosophy is truth transmogrified into error, then history is error transmogrified into truth.

The error I am thinking about here is the recent Western love affair with counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine. COIN was known as "Hearts and Minds" in Vietnam. The idea is that a military campaign in order to be effective must compel the allegiance of the conquered population. In theory, this allegiance is won by building schools and other infrastructure and by providing excellent social services; in reality, allegiance is extracted by means of terror and propaganda.

David Petraeus managed to rehabilitate COIN after it was thoroughly discredited in Vietnam. In a spectacular feat of propaganda, COIN got wrapped in with the 2007 troop surge in Iraq and Petraeus was granted credit for defeating the insurgency in Iraq. What really happened is that the neighborhoods of Baghdad were largely ethnically cleansed, and the Shiites won the sectarian civil war.

Nonetheless, when Obama entered office he adopted Petraeus' COIN doctrine and decided to apply it to Afghanistan in a troop surge of his own. The USAID stabilization programs that Risen writes about were created to augment military objectives by providing the infrastructure that would win the hearts and minds of the Afghans in areas were the U.S. troops had beaten back the Taliban:

The stabilization projects were part of an ambitious aid program started by President Obama in December 2009 as part of the “civilian surge” he announced along with an increase in American troop levels in Afghanistan. Two of the new stabilization aid programs were created by the aid agency, which spent $304 million through one, called Stability in Key Areas, and $113.9 million through another, the Community Cohesion Initiative, relying on contractors to set up the projects.

The programs provide a case study of the kind of problems that have plagued the effort to aid Afghanistan in what is now America’s longest war. Since the United States’ invasion of the country after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, it has spent nearly $110 billion on assistance programs there, for military training and equipment for the Afghan Army as well as for other security services and civilian aid projects like the construction of schools, hospitals and highways, according to a recent report by John F. Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction.

Critics say that the United States has poured so much money into Afghanistan with so little supervision that the assistance programs have distorted the Afghan economy and have had unintended consequences. Corruption has been rampant.

“We spent too much money too fast in too small a country with too little oversight,” said Mr. Sopko, who has issued a series of scathing reports about waste, fraud and abuse in aid projects. 

Like many other aid programs in Afghanistan, the stabilization programs suffered from basic problems. Many current and former aid officials and contractors had examples of those problems, but agreed to describe them only if they could remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak about them. 

For instance, several said, U.S.A.I.D. officials, who could not visit the project sites for security reasons, sometimes did not know whether the projects had even been completed. 

“U.S.A.I.D. came to us and said, ‘We can’t find our projects,’” said one person involved with the study evaluating the two stabilization programs. “And they asked us to help find them. We realized that there was a lot of ghosting in the data. We would go through the data they would give us on the location of a project and try to find where there really was a project, whether it was in a nearby village. And sometimes we couldn’t find anything.” 

Another American official who was involved with the evaluation of the aid agency’s programs said, “Oversight is really tough when you can’t get out to the project sites.”

None of this should come as any surprise. The Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR) publishes one report after another outlining the failed, corrupt nature of the U.S. occupation there. Yet the U.S. remains in Afghanistan despite its manifest failure. We do not live in an open society.

At least now COIN cannot be so easily peddled to a gullible press as a rationale for occupation. COIN is discredited. Now war has to be accepted for what it is: destruction.

Coups and Assassinations Coming Shortly to Kabul

I'm sure the Gray Lady ran a biographical perspective piece on Ashraf Ghani at some point when he emerged out of the pack of presidential contenders to replace the increasingly recalcitrant U.S. quisling Hamid Karzai. I must have missed it. But I didn't miss the ringing endorsement of the newly -- one doesn't want to say "elected" because that doesn't really capture the process that led to Ghani assuming the title of president -- seated leader of Afghanistan by Ralph Nader.

I am familiar with Ralph Nader. I changed my life because of his Green Party candidacy for president in 2000. He doesn't give out pro forma recommendations; he does't play the usual kind of quid pro quo, "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine"-type of politics. He's an iconoclast with a lot of pride who does things his own way.

I remember being at a campaign event early on in the 2000 election, a fundraiser. Nader was speaking at a coffee house; he was talking about the legacy of legislature-backed stadium giveaways to professional sports teams. He mentioned the amount of money Seahawks owner Paul Allen had spent to win the initiative campaign to build what is currently named CenturyLink Field. I called from out of the small crowd surrounding him the correct figure, "Five million dollars in five weeks." Nader shot me the steely look -- even though I wrote a check (I can't remember how much) to be in attendance -- of a man who didn't like to be interrupted but one who appreciated another armed with the facts willing to raise his voice.

So Nader's recommendation of Ghani means something. And that is supported in a story today by Azam Ahmed and Declan Walsh, "New Afghan Leader, Putting Focus on Graft, Revives Bank Fraud Inquiry":

KABUL, Afghanistan — Signaling his intent to improve the Afghan government’s poor reputation on corruption, President Ashraf Ghani on Wednesday ordered a new examination of the stagnant Kabul Bank fraud prosecutions. 

The bank, likened to a roughly $800 million Ponzi scheme after powerful insiders pillaged it through fraudulent loans, has come to symbolize the legal impunity enjoyed by Afghanistan’s elite. And the case has become a major sticking point for donor nations and the International Monetary Fund, which at one point made prosecution of those responsible for the bank’s collapse a condition of any new loans to the government.

Just three days into Mr. Ghani’s presidency, his decree about the bank was clearly meant to reassure Western partners that aid to the country would not be a bad investment. The day before, as Afghanistan signed long-term security deals with the United States and NATO, Mr. Ghani had emphasized the importance of international aid in tackling “shared challenges.”

The Gray Lady, at times able to comport herself in stunning fashion, has an excellent unsigned editorial today, "Paying Afghanistan’s Bills," that I will quote in its entirety because it does such a fine job defining those "shared challenges":

By the end of the year, Congress will have appropriated more money for Afghanistan’s reconstruction, when adjusted for inflation, than the United States spent rebuilding 16 European nations after World War II under the Marshall Plan. 

A staggering portion of that money — $104 billion — has been mismanaged and stolen. Much of what was built is crumbling or will be unsustainable. Well-connected Afghans smuggled millions of stolen aid money in suitcases that were checked onto Dubai-bound flights. The Afghan government largely turned a blind eye to widespread malfeasance. Even as revelations of fraud and abuse stacked up, the United States continued shoveling money year after year because cutting off the financial spigot was seen as a sure way to doom the war effort. 

As the Pentagon winds down its combat mission there at the end of the year, it’s tempting to think of the Afghan war as a chapter that is coming to an end — at least for American taxpayers. But, as things stand, the United States and its allies will continue paying Afghanistan’s bills for the foreseeable future. That commitment was solidified Tuesday as the American ambassador in Kabul and Afghanistan’s security adviser signed a bilateral security agreement that will keep a small contingent of NATO troops there for at least two years. 

The United States and NATO partners recently agreed to spend $5.1 billion a year to pay for the army and police, until at least 2017. Western donors are expected to continue to give billions more for reconstruction and other initiatives, recognizing that Afghanistan won’t be weaned off international aid anytime soon. In fact, the government appears to be broke.

A few weeks ago, Afghanistan’s Finance Ministry made an urgent plea to the United States for a $537 million bailout, warning that it would otherwise not be able to make payroll. That’s part of a broader, worrisome trend. The International Monetary Fund estimates that Afghanistan will face a financial gap of roughly $7.7 billion annually between now and 2018. 

If the flow of money is to keep going, the Afghan government has to prove that it can be trusted. And, for its part, Congress should not hesitate to cut off the aid if corruption remains unabated. 

Afghanistan’s new president, Ashraf Ghani, who took office on Monday, has pledged to stamp out graft. “I am not corrupt, and I am not going to encourage corruption, tolerate it or become the instrument,” the president, a former World Bank executive, told the BBC in an interview. 

That will be easier said than done in a country where back-room deals are the norm. Mr. Ghani can show he is serious by appointing and empowering a new attorney general willing to take on unscrupulous officials. His proposal to lead a new procurement board is commendable because it would make him personally accountable. 

Of the $104 billion that American lawmakers have appropriated for Afghan reconstruction, nearly $16 billion remains unspent, according to John Sopko, the inspector general who is overseeing the reconstruction effort. As one of the poorest nations on earth, Afghanistan clearly has plenty of needs. But the American agencies tasked with spending the money must do a better job identifying priorities, setting realistic goals and adopting stronger safeguards. 

Delivering a speech at Georgetown University recently, Mr. Sopko marveled at the Marshall Plan comparison. “What have we gotten for the investment?” he asked.

My only problem with the editorial is the impression it casts that USG has somehow been a duped victim of all this fiscal mismanagement rather than its chief architect. The American way of doing things is just as corrupt as the Afghan way of doing things. What went on with the fleecing of Kabul Bank had a precedent in the American savings and loan scandals of the 1980s.

With the Taliban ascendant -- this year was the deadliest for the Afghan police since the U.S.-led occupation began 13-years ago -- the U.S. experience in Iraq is noteworthy. Once the U.S. military exited, the Iraqi Army became little more than an elaborate system of graft, a Ponzi scheme, where officers purchase their commissions to receive kickbacks from recruits, who may or may not actually be reporting for duty. This is not to say that this doesn't occur when the U.S. is in country maintaining a supervisory role; it is just that the corruption doesn't run so rampant the the entire system implodes as it did in Iraq. The ability of American military supervisors to call in airstrikes probably has something to do with it too.

A singular description of the corruption-fueled collapse of the Iraqi military can be found in an interview of Patrick Cockburn by Tariq Ali, "The Rise of ISIS and the Origins of the New Middle East War," that appeared earlier in the week on the Counterpunch web site:

Tariq Ali: And so, if we come down to the speed with which this particular organisation swept through parts of Iraq, which you yourself talk about in the book, how do you explain the total collapse of the Iraqi army, Patrick? Is it in that sense not too much different from the army created by the West in Afghanistan, the fact that they are not prepared to fight and die for the United States? At that time it was, al-Qaeda and Iraq was only one of a number of serious resistance movements to the occupation but it was very evident in Baghdad at the time when I went to American briefings that anything that happened was attributed by the spokesman, the military spokesman, to al-Qaeda. Of course this played well back in the US, but in Iraq it had quite the contrary effect which people who were against the occupation think, oh it’s al-Qaeda who’s doing all this resisting, let’s go an get a black flag and join them…

Patrick Cockburn: Yeah, and even more so. I mean I think this is, it’s difficult to think of another example in history, where there are 300 or 350 thousand men in the Iraqi army, they’d spent 41.6 billion dollars on this army over the last three years. But it disintegrated because of an attack by maybe a couple of thousand people in Mosul. Why did it happen? Well, the army was rather extraordinary. I mean one Iraqi general I was talking to who’d been forcibly retired said at the beginning of the disaster was the Americans, [who] when they set it up, insisted that supplies and things like that should be outsourced, privatised. 

So immediately a colonel of a battalion nominally of 600 men would get money for 600 men, [but] in fact there were only 200 men in it, and would pocket the difference, which was spread out among the officers. And this applied to fuel, it applied to ammunition… At the time of the fall of Mosul there are meant to be 30,000 troops there. In fact, it’s estimated that only one in three was there. Because what you did was: you joined the army, you got your full salary and then you kicked back half that salary to your officer, who spread it among the officers. So I remember about a year ago talking to a senior Iraqi politician, and who said look: the army’s going to collapse if it’s attacked. I said surely some will fight, he said: no no no, you don’t understand. These officers are not soldiers, they’re investors! 

They have no interest in fighting anybody; they have interest in making money out of their investment. Of course you had to buy your position. So in 2009, you want to be a colonel in the Iraqi army, it’ll cost you about 20,000 dollars, more recently it cost you about $200,000. You want to be divisional commander, and there are 15 divisions, it will cost you about 2 million. Of course, there are other ways of making money. Checkpoints on the roads act as sort of customs barriers and a tariff on each truck going through would be paid. So that’s why they ran away, led by their commanding officer, the three commanding generals got into a helicopter in civilian clothes and fled to Erbil, the Kurdish capital. And that led to the final dissolution of the army. 

Tariq Ali: It is one of the most astonishing events in recent history, Patrick. I mean can you think of any other equivalent, even in the last century?

Patrick Cockburn: I can’t think of any of such a large well-equipped army disintegrating. You could say that Saddam’s army disintegrated in ’91 when attacked by the Americans, and again in 2003. But then it was attacked by the largest military force in the world and was being bombed. So it’s not a parallel. It of course shows that ISIS was quite effective in spreading terror through social media, by films of it decapitating Shia captives. So the soldiers were terrified of ISIS.

Nader's ringing endorsement of Ghani makes me thinks that he is different. If he is, we'll know soon enough. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Working Group on Bribery "will release its report, 'Unfinished Business,' which names every beneficiary of the Kabul Bank scandal" today according to Ahmed and Walsh. If Ghani goes after those named, even if they are the elite, the palace intrigue will grow thick. Coups and assassinations can't be far off.

Sopko on Afghanistan + Nader Praises Ghani

Ahmed Rashid has an OpEd piece, "Afghanistan’s Failed Transformation," today that is worth reading. Rashid achieved prominence in the United States post-9/11 when his book Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (2000) was on the Gray Lady's bestseller list.

Rashid says,

John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, apparently is the only official in Washington who dares speak truth to power. In a Sept. 12 speech at Georgetown University, he said that Afghanistan “remains under assault by insurgents and is short of domestic revenue, plagued by corruption, afflicted by criminal elements involved in opium and smuggling, and struggling to execute basic functions of government.” His comments were largely ignored by the American media, and there was no immediate reaction from the Obama administration.

I decided to see if Sopko's Georgetown speech is available on YouTube. It is (see above).

Rashid says that the U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan needs to be judged on the basis of four post-Taliban transitions: political, military, economic, and the ability of the country to disentangle itself from meddling foreign powers. Rashid says Afghanistan has failed in all four transitions.

Interestingly, Ralph Nader had a piece on the Counterpunch web site yesterday hailing new Afghan president Ashraf Ghani ("Will Ashraf Ghani be Given the Room to Govern? Afghan Voters Choose a Better Future"):

I’ve known Ashraf Ghani and his family since his teaching days at Johns Hopkins. I knew of his wide-ranging interests and ability to see through propaganda and verbal pomposity. As a comprehensive, functional progressive, he is not strapped to any prejudging ideology. During our visit to California in 2012, he spoke of traveling to scores of Afghan villages to sense their expectations, their rhythms and their responsiveness to practical engagements to develop community economies, health care and education. His experience in the creation of the National Solidarity Program, which provided block grants to villages for plans devised and implemented by village councils, helped him in his visits to various Afghan villages. Today, that little-noticed program covers over half of Afghanistan’s 21,000 villages.

*** 

The Afghan population is an asset because the people are ready for government officials with honesty, smarts and the ability to get results. They want exactly what Ashraf Ghani can deliver for them: basic necessities, public works and stability for their families and communities in as self-reliant a manner as possible.

The editorial in the August 15, 2014 issue of Science magazine noted a potentially positive national asset for Ghani: “the hyperspectral survey of Afghanistan by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in 2007… quantified 24 world-class mineral deposits (including iron, cobalt, gold, copper, and rare earth elements), positioning Afghanistan to become a major supplier of minerals…” 

No one knows better about the worker or the distributional, environmental, and contractual protections needed before such minerals are subjected to extraction than this practical, inclusive renaissance man with an inherent personal touch, who is about to lead this war-ravaged country. 

Will Ashraf Ghani be given the elbow room to exert his remarkable leadership capabilities to bring out the best from Afghanistan? Or, will the forces of disintegration, once again, reassert themselves to dissect and divide a country that conniving outsiders and corrupt insiders will not leave alone? 

For more information, please see http://en.ashrafghani.com/.