Scott Horton has an important post about our "corruption racket" in Afghanistan in particular, and central Asia in general. He first references this report from Dexter Filkins and Mark Mazzetti in the New York Times, which reads in part (my emphasis throughout):
[Mohammed Zia Salehi, chief of administration for Afghanistan’s National Security Council] appears to have been on the [C.I.A.] payroll for many years, according to officials in Kabul and Washington. It is unclear exactly what Mr. Salehi does in exchange for his money, whether providing information to the spy agency, advancing American views inside the presidential palace, or both. Mr. Salehi’s relationship with the C.I.A. underscores deep contradictions at the heart of the Obama administration’s policy in Afghanistan, with American officials simultaneously demanding that Mr. Karzai root out the corruption that pervades his government while subsidizing the very people suspected of perpetrating it. ...That's not only the news (Salehi, part of the Afghan NSC, is a CIA asset), it's also the official frame (Obama is deciding how to fight Afghan corruption).
These ties underscore doubts about how seriously the Obama administration intends to fight corruption here.
Mr. Horton, on the other hand, understands this differently — that the Obama administration is creating Afghan corruption:
This detailed, persuasive story merits a few additional notes. First, when a public official accepts payments from a foreign power in wartime–in exchange for information he has secured in the course of his official duties to the foreign power or to influence his government for the benefit of a foreign power–it may constitute treason or espionage, even though it may not be prosecuted if the foreign power in question is a close ally. In any event, however, the acts constitute an acute form of public corruption. In this case, then, it puts the case quite softly to say that the contradiction is that the United States is “subsidizing” the very people suspected of corruption. It would be more accurate to state that the United States is inducing corrupt acts from the very people it seeks to prosecute for corruption. In legal terms, such a claim could be met with a defense known as in pari delicto (namely, “you’re guilty of the same offense yourself”) or its more recent and subtle variant, graymail.Mr. Horton's article is rich in several other ways. Seems we've been doing that a lot lately, "inducing corrupt acts" in our official capacity as a government. For example:
This is the third time this summer that the United States has been slammed with credible charges of corrupting foreign governments in Central Asia. The first came from the Central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan, where, following a popular uprising that toppled a corrupt kleptocrat, the new government charged that the United States had made illegal payments possibly totaling hundreds of millions of dollars to the deposed leader under the guise of supplying aviation fuel to the Manas Transit Center—the key logistical point in the Afghanistan war effort’s northern supply corridor. U.S. efforts to refute the corruption charges have been pathetic, and as months pass, the evidentiary case that the payments were in fact made to businesses operated by the old dictator and were indeed an extremely sweet deal has become all but irrefutable. Although the U.S. diplomats promised to clean up the situation, on the ground in Kyrgyzstan today there is a broad perception that the United States will simply sculpt new deals to bribe the revolutionary government.Because Horton has been "on the ground in Kyrgyzstan," I take his report as credible. Two other examples follow that one. Horton properly calls our behavior "schizophrenic."
American policy towards corruption in Central Asia is thus exposed as schizophrenic. On the one hand the United States purports to be resolutely opposed to corruption and prepared to spend enormous sums to expose and prosecute it in the interest of transparency, good government, and saving the taxpayers the expense of corrupt contracts. . . . But on the other hand, it is increasingly apparent that the United States is itself one of the most staggeringly corrupt actors in the region[.]A great read for you Afghan fans. Graveyard of empires indeed, and of tons of your tax dollars too. (Deficit hawks, take note.)
GP
