Afghan Corruption Got Lots Of Help From US

[I'm just writing notes today.  Consider this jotting down thoughts before other things interfere.]

Lots of commentators are listing corruption in the Afghan government and army as one of the major causes for the rapid collapse of the government.  

Westerners seem to wear one-way glasses when it come seeing to corruption.  "Poor" "third world" countries are seen as rife with corruption compared to Western countries.  

I would argue it's like alcoholism among the homeless and poor and among the middle and upper classes.  Homeless alcoholics are drunk in public while people with more money do a better job of hiding their alcoholism.  

I just want to point out that Western corruption in Afghanistan probably dwarfed local corruption.  

Some examples:

From a SIGAR (Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.)

"Gallery of Greed

 U.S. reconstruction activities in Afghanistan, or any other conflict zone, face the constant threat of criminal conspiracies among personnel who rotate in and out of theater, infecting their successors with the virus of corruption.

 Over the past five years, SIGAR’s Investigations Directorate has uncovered and detailed a classic example of this threat—an extended, widespread, and intricate pattern of criminality involving U.S. military personnel and Afghan contractors at the Humanitarian Assistance Yard (the Yard) at Bagram Airfield near Kabul, Afghanistan.

 In June 2012, SIGAR investigators following leads uncovered an unusual pattern of suspect criminal activity at the Yard. They found traces of criminal activity affecting inventories, accounting, issuance of supplies, payments, and contract oversight at the Yard, which serves as a storage-and-distribution facility for millions of dollars’ worth of clothing, food, school supplies, and other items purchased from local Afghan vendors. U.S. military commanders provided those supplies to displaced Afghans as part of the Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP) to meet urgent humanitarian relief needs for the Afghan people."

From The Marketplace:

"At just short of 20 years, the conflict in Afghanistan was America’s longest war. More than 2,000 U.S. service members were killed there. The U.S. spent billions over the years to sustain its troops in Afghanistan and hired military contractors to feed and house them.

Those contractors profited the most from the war, but those systems can lead to fraud and waste. The U.S. military relied on contractors like KBR and DynCorp International for all sorts of things in Afghanistan.

“For cooking, for driving, for delivering supplies — they were used across the board,” said Linda Bilmes, who teaches public policy at Harvard. She said that, sometimes, the Pentagon had so-called no-cost deals with contractors. Whatever a project cost, the government would pay.

“The whole system was set up in a way to enable contractors to rip off the government,” she said."

From the Daily Beast:

"America has spent at least $2.3 trillion in Afghanistan, but very few know that because the U.S. relied upon a complex ecosystem of defense contractors, belt-way banditry, and aid contractors. Of the 10-20 percent of contracts that remained in the country, the U.S. rarely cared about the efficacy of the initiative. While corruption is rife within Afghanistan’s government, the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction repeatedly alleged bewildering corruption by American firms and individuals working in Afghanistan. In many cases, American firms even defrauded Afghans. A military member of the International Security Assistance Force explained to Carlotta Gall: 'Without being too dramatic, American contractors are contributing to fueling the insurgency.'”

Here's a Treasury official, reported in the Washington Post,  questioning an American consultant working with Kabul Bank for three years about the bank:

"A second unnamed Treasury Department official told government interviewers that soon after he arrived in Afghanistan in the summer of 2010, he met with an American who had been working on contract as a consultant to Afghanistan’s central bank for at least three years. The U.S. official wanted to know more about Kabul Bank, which unknown to both of them was on the verge of failure.

“We had an hour-long conversation,”  the official said. 'I asked him, do you think this is a financially sound bank? He said, ‘Yes.’ And literally 30 days afterward, the whole house of cards came down. This was one of the biggest misses in my career. A $1 billion bank collapsed, and the U.S. adviser swore to me it was financially sound.'”

You know this consultant was making a ton of money plus expenses that probably were well above the average US income.   His job, it would seem, was a scam itself.  

This shouldn't come as a shock to anyone.  No giant expenditures happen in Washington unless there are lobbyists pushing hard for it.  And war lobbyists are among the most effective.

Afghan citizens had to choose a path that would keep them safe from the Taliban and from the US backed government.  Supporting the government made them targets for the Taliban.  Supporting the Taliban made the targets for the government and the US.  For many of them, their petty acts of what we would call corruption, was how they managed to feed their families and stay alive.  

For American contractors it was a way to make huge profits.  

And is there anything more corrupt than the Sackler family working a deal in Bankruptcy Court to make it impossible for them or many other individuals or companies to be prosecuted for all the opioid deaths they caused?  Just because they can pay $4 billion and still have more than that left over?  That's the same kind of deal Jeffrey Epstein worked out with the Alexander Acosta, who then became Trump's Secretary of Labor.